Virtue Fell
by The Very Last Valkyrie
Summary: AU. A tortured billionaire. A beautiful thief. In a world of possibilities, there's only so many ways to find each other.
1. Preface

**_If you read my vignettes, you may remember one called '_You Know My Name'_ about a Chuck who semi-stalked a Blair with the pseudonym November. A few people - including my very good friend _bethaboo_ - requested to see a continuation to that storyline, though I doubt they were expecting a full length fic to come out of it! My influences for this were varied and bizarre: Beauty and the Beast, Last Tango in Paris and Hellboy, to name just a few.  
I should warn you now that this fic will be very AU and dark. There will be references to bulimia, violence, drugs and sex, and that is why it has an M rating. At the same time, this fic is about love, redemption, identity, self-belief and the inevitability of two people finding each other with a world of separation between them.  
I hope you enjoy it.  
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**Preface**

For the first three years of his life, Chuck Bass was raised in absolute darkness. He had learned to associate pain with light from the moment he had cried out at its intrusion on his weak eyes, and had felt his father's hand sear the side of his face and send him reeling.

"Be a man," Bart had snarled at the barely sentient boy, stalking from the room and taking Chuck's diminutive world with him. From that day forth the nanny, the maid, the cook and even the boys who ran back and forth between the monolith dedicated to Bass Industries and Bart's home office would avoid Chuck as if he were a plague carrier, a leper, a harbinger of doom; he was told that he had killed his mother, and as such was undeserving of all that Bart offered. At the same time, he was a Bass. He had been born into privilege, and as such it marked him irrevocably; there was nothing he touched that did not have the gloss of wealth upon, nothing he wanted that he could not get. The longing for human company, however, was a desire to be locked in a box and never touched, never looked at and never shared with anyone if the young Charles wished to be as great a man as his father.

Perhaps one might have expected such a child to grow up humble and meek, merely submitting to the wishes of his betters, but it was not to be; instead, Chuck became cold, cruel and arrogant, reckless and ruthless and prepared to do whatever it took to rise higher in his father's esteem. Failure sent him spiralling downward into a haze of despair tinged with drink, drugs and sex, and his name became synonymous with vice. Bart looked on with a sneer and a scowl for his only son, mocking Chuck's losses and scorning even the most meanest of his gains for the company's benefit.

The darkness in Chuck's soul became thicker as he grew into a man, insouciantly handsome and conceited to the core. Maturity meant that he rarely spoke to his father, preferring to inter himself in the Empire – the hotel he had been given and instructed to pull back from the brink of foreclosure – with enough scotch and company to send him into a money fuelled stupor, ignoring the world outside the windows which had nothing to do with business or his own satisfaction.

Then a madman slammed his truck into and, according to witness statements, partly over Bart's limo, and Chuck's world crumbled.

He was free.

And he had nothing.

He was known city-wide for his criminal deviance, his callousness and his hatred for the orthodox and usual. He was not ready, in the eyes of the world, to take up the reins of Bass Industries; he was hardly even fit to be a shareholder.

But take power he did, with such force of will and panache that every person he met seemed to be looking at him sideways thereafter. He became a force to be reckoned with, sinning on the side, and by the time his preliminary year had almost passed he was considered one of the most prominent and talented young CEOs New York had ever seen. He was single-minded, without mercy when decisions had to be made, swimming upstream against the tide. Yet despite all this success and the praise he received from every quarter, he was still the man Bart had raised him to be: appetite insatiable, draining the life from those who were disposable and the light from those who weren't. He fed on rival companies, sucked them dry and assimilated their assets even as others his age were throwing their caps in the air and promising to be friends forever. He needed nothing, wanted everything, and was prepared to go to the very ends of the earth to get it.

He found it November 10th, 2010.

She was a freshman at Columbia, but he'd never seen her go to a class. She had accounts at Saks, Barneys, Bloomingdales and everywhere else that mattered, but there was no credit card registered, and her bank account was inactive. She lived in a Penthouse on Fifth Avenue with a maid and a never-ending supply of filmy nightgowns, and he called her November for the month of her birth. He had found her on an 'It's Your Day' page, idly flicking over assets as he waited for dinner and that night's entertainment to arrive.

From the moment he'd seen her picture, he hadn't wanted to know her name.

He just wanted to know _her_.

Months passed, and Chuck learnt about November. Her fingers stuck to things – jewellery, watches, billfolds – and didn't let up until the crisp greens were folded between her fingers, gilding them emerald as she shook back her hair. He began to reward her for the bigger items with pretty things of her own: dresses and perfume from Paris, her favourite Falke stockings, diamonds in settings more intricate and expensive than any she could thieve. He never left a note, never told her who to thank; yet in some way, he liked to think she knew he was watching. She told him so with the slide of her skirt up over her thighs as she climbed into a cab, with fire engine red lipstick that was hot black on camera and sent electric shocks darting through him. He came to realise that girls were pointless when he could watch November, her traffic stopping lips parting as she laughed with a girlfriend, and dream that his fingers were hers. They ran in the same circles, he and she, concentric rings of fire and ice on the highest of levels that was societal hell. He would have been quite content to watch her forever, to be with her through the monitor, the camera, the blurry lens until the day she died, or they both did.

However, while it was true that they ran in the same circles, it was equally certain that concentricity would one day force them to a finite point – and thence into inferno.

_Anne Archibald & the Girls Inc. Foundation cordially invite_

**Charles B. Bass**

_To a benefit for the children and underage mothers of the developing world  
The Palace Hotel  
September 13__th_

Chuck looked in the mirror as he tied his bow tie, and was surprised it didn't crack._  
_


	2. Twist Me, Turn Me, Learn Me

**1. Twist Me, Turn Me, Learn Me**

The ballroom was a hive – for want of a better word – the hum of so many polite, inconsequential conversations like the buzzing of so many brightly jacketed bees. A benefit, Chuck observed, was only ever of benefit to those present at the time, and never of much use to those it was supposedly in aid of; nevertheless, he made his way over to his hostess (in his hotel) with polite nods to the left and right and private smiles at several society wives that their friends and flunkies pretended not to see.

"Anne," he said, and she extended her cold cheek to be kissed.

"Charles." Her eyes were blue and hard, glittering like sapphires in a diamond pale face. "On behalf of the board, I'd like to thank you for your very generous donation."

"It was my pleasure."

"How is Bass Industries doing?"

He had learned better by now than to run from questioning, especially when the crème de la crème of New York society was milling around him in pastel coloured gowns and cookie cutter tuxes. There were at least five has-beens (those who had already patronised his bed like the bored little Stepford wives they were), several maybes (perhaps, if they would do it quietly and not insist on champagne and foreplay first) and one definitive (Georgina Sparks had never failed to get on her knees for anyone, and the kiss she blew him did not prove otherwise). Thus Chuck itemised the room as he spoke to Anne, casually complimenting her work with the charity and inquiring after her husband, her father, and those politically minded Vanderbilt cousins who could possibly be of use to him in future ventures. When the conversation had come to its proportionate conclusion, Chuck felt as though he were surfacing from beneath deep water. He raised an eyebrow at Georgina, who ran her tongue over her lips and turned towards the bathrooms. He turned too.

A new influx of guests swept into the room in a flurry of Dior, Versace, Armani and Ralph Lauren. There were a few daring beings in Alexander McQueen and Galliano, but that wasn't what had caught Chuck's eye. The room became still as his blood beat in his ears, rushing to his brain with a jolt of adrenaline which slammed his body like a wall of water. His jaw clenched reflexively against the urge to shout her name:

_November_.

She stood in the doorway, framed by two black jackets with her purse beneath her arm and hair streaming down her back in carefully orchestrated curls. She was wearing red – Lord help him, red – and her clavicle was a perfect double arch beneath the lights. Her eyes flicked from side to side, surveying the room as a small smile of triumph formed on her scarlet painted mouth. Chuck was inexplicably aroused with as much ease as if she had suddenly stripped naked, and even as he stiffened their eyes met. _Money_, that look said. _I can see it on you. I can smell it from here._

So she moved towards him, a predator towards prey.

But Chuck was no innocent.

"Good evening," she said lightly, as if it were of no consequence.

"Good evening," he replied. She eyed him curiously as he took her hand, warming the slim fingers first between his before pressing his mouth to them. Her lips parted in a swift intake of breath as his tongue traced across her knuckles, a seductive caress that was highly inappropriate for their first meeting. Chuck hardly cared; he had bought this dress, craved its company, and he knew well enough from the dilating of her pupils that beneath it, her body was taut with a tension that she could not explain. They had only just met, after all – why should her knees feel weak at the impropriety of a complete stranger, and why should such heat ripple over skin as he stood and looked her up and down with one swift glance that was undeniably arrogant, possessing.

"Come with me," he bade her, and she took his hand once more.

Chuck guided her to the very bathroom where Georgina was waiting, tongue lolling, panting to be used like a whore. A few sharp words sent her sliding back to the party with her dress a little lower, her chin a little higher. He didn't let go of _her_ hand, however, as he locked the door, sliding the bolt across and feeling her tremble at the finality of its final click. Her gaze flickered across his torso, and he knew what she was looking for: wallet, billfold, keys, an excuse to be here that did not include pure, outrageous lust.

"Your name," she requested.

"Shhh." He ran his thumb along the corner of her mouth, smudged the lipstick but didn't care. "No talking."

Her lips were furious when he kissed her, hard and soft and yielding all at once, the self-doubt and regret he had engendered prompting her to fight. She bit down hard on his bottom lip until he tasted blood, then pressed her tongue against it and purred like a cat as he snarled back and wrenched at her bodice. The dress was unaccommodating, however, so Chuck settled for plunging one hand into its ruched majesty and finding her breast, shaping it with his fingers and manipulating the soft flesh as her nails dragged bloody hellfire across the back of his neck and raked across his jacket.

"Name," she repeated, and he slammed her into the tiled wall.

She was winded, but only momentarily, scraping her teeth across his neck as he struggled with the myriad layers of skirt and petticoat beneath to find her. She made a soft sound when he gripped her knee, a louder one as he hiked one spike heeled leg up around his waist and braced one hand above her head. She scowled at him, tendrils of hair framing her flushed face.

"You think I'm going to have sex with you without a moment's hesitation without even knowing your name?"

Chuck yanked at the scrap of fabric that constituted her lingerie and smirked. "I _know_ you're going to have sex with me without a moment's hesitation. I know you." He leaned forward, pressing his mouth to her ear even as cold zipper met warm flesh and the friction made her shudder and sway. Her hand dropped – seemingly of its own accord – to help him out of his pants, though the straining muscles in her shoulders seemed to indicate that she was not exactly comfortable or used to being taken up against a wall in a public bathroom by a man she had never met before.

Good.

"I bought you this dress," he told her.

"You –"

He pushed into her even as she spoke, the acute angle of her body and the arch of her back making their first together shallow, exquisite and torturous. She wrapped both legs around him and pushed back, still spoiling for a fight, her ankles crossed as she moaned and dug her heels simultaneously into his back. He bit her on the side of the throat as retribution, and she pulled hard on his hair, barely moving in the traditional pattern of this dance but twisting, grinding, pulling back and away from him in a manner which was almost as good, or perhaps better. He closed his eyes and called her November in his mind, the darkness punctuated only with the sounds she made that seemed to light his way like signal fires. It was she who changed the tempo, shifting faster, rocking like a child in need of comfort when what she really sought was completion. She was hot around him, warm where his skin met hers, real and alive with her heart beating against him, and she was still a ghost.

"I bought you this dress," he whispered, words almost inaudible as she whimpered. "And my name is Charlie."

The tipping point was rising, the edge of the world he had seen so many times and passed over so many more. It seemed almost purer to be doing so with her, but the time for contemplation and gratification was past. It was now a primal need to get this over, to end it, and he opened his eyes to see hers glossy with heat and black with determination. "November," he murmured, and she clenched so hard around him that he wasn't sure where the pain ended and the pleasure began. They broke against a bathroom wall, the victim and the predator, though who was who when she was a thief and he was possibly a psychopath he was not sure. She screamed and he shouted, and the moment was almost choreographed. She stabbed her nails into his chest, clutching at the available flesh where his bow tie had come undone and panted her way though aftershock after aftershock, her thighs slick with a mixture of he and she which scented the air with blood and sex.

"Charlie?"

"Charlie."

Chuck let her down only when the tremors had stopped, letting her body slide to the floor and feeling his own legs give out at the shock of separation. She was half-sprawled with her back against the wall and he was on his knees before her, and though there was a light sheen of sweat on her brow and her chest heaved beneath the disobliging bodice, her eyes were clear and curious.

"Why do you give me things?" She asked.

"Because you're beautiful. I like to watch you."

"Do you even know my name?"

He shook his head.

"Do you want to?"

He shook his head once again, then tucked a stray curl behind her ear, running his fingertips down and across her cheek as he shrugged. "I was attracted to you from the moment I first saw you – not today, not yesterday, but a long time ago. You weren't real until now, but for now you can be real and still be the you that I know. I don't want to know your name because I know everything: that you steal –" The jaw beneath his touch became rigid. "And that you go to Columbia, and have a friend with blonde hair and read George Sand. I know you like old movies. I know you like ballet. And now –" He passed his fingers over her silent lips. "I know you kiss like an angel and fuck like the devil incarnate."

"You're sick," she whispered, though there was no judgement in it.

"Perhaps."

"How much do you want me?"

"So much that it drives me mad."

"Can you speak French?"

"Why?"

"I want to know."

"Then yes, I do."

"Good." She straightened a little, casually nipping at his fingers as if it were nothing out of the ordinary. "Now go back to the party, Charlie, and I'll be out in a minute."

He frowned. "You want me to leave."

She laughed. "I am real, and in case it has escaped your notice, you just took me up against a tiled wall and messed up this dress. I have no underwear, my makeup is probably ruined and my hair is coming down. You may walk around like some kind of lothario with your shirt all rumpled like that, but I need some time."

Chuck stood, and suddenly there was doubt in his eyes. "You will come out, won't you?"

"Yes."

He left, and the girl dragged herself up by a corner of the countertop and turned her face to the mirror, finally surveying the damage done to the careful study that was Blair Cornelia Waldorf, the socialite abandoned by her parents and her friends. There was throbbing tension and pain between her legs and she felt marred, dirty with the stickiness that had run down almost to her knees. She remembered her brazen bites, her moans. She remembered her scratches, her sighs, the shamelessness and shamefulness that had brought her to this place, an anonymous fuck with a man whose face she couldn't place and who bought her pretty things because he was insane and she was a whore. Blair washed her face, and then she very calmly pulled open the door of a stall, knelt before the toilet bowl and rammed her fingers down her throat until her anger, her desire and her guilt had all washed down the drain and into the New York sewer system to join the sins of so many other petty mortals.

Chuck accepted a glass of champagne from a passing waiter and turned at the tentative tap on his shoulder. A younger girl – too young, and anyway he was waiting on November – smiled, her pale blonde hair shining against a white tuxedo shirt and black vest.

"I was told to give you this, sir."

He accepted his wallet almost in a daze as the server went on her way, wondering at which point in the before, during and after the little minx had swiped it. Half an inch of paper stuck out at the top, at odds with the glossy leather exterior, and Chuck removed a carefully folded square of paper from between two hundred dollar bills.

_Sushi of Gari  
402 East 78th St.  
Tomorrow  
2PM  
Don't be late_

It was no surprise, therefore, that he returned to the bathroom to find it empty, with only the running faucet to indicate anyone had even been there at all.


	3. Great White

**2. Great White**

He was surprised at her choice of venue – one of the hottest Asian restaurants on the Upper East Side would not have been his preference for a discreet rendezvous – but dutifully handed her note to his driver, only carefully reclaiming it once Arthur had absorbed the address and nodded respectfully. Chuck ran his fingers over the folds as they drove, gazing lazily out at the city with little inclination to admire it. He was sore, which was rare after a lifetime of debauchery, and his bare back had been a sight to see in the bathroom mirror: red streaked, with stiletto marks from her heels embedded in his skin like bullet holes. He flexed his muscles, enjoyed the silent burn and swilled a little Bombay Sapphire in lieu of a Lifesaver. He didn't need to smooth his hair. He didn't need to check his watch.

He was precisely on time.

Chuck Bass was _always_ on time.

She barely even looked up as he sat down, overdressed for the time of day in a single breasted suit and cravat. She was wearing a drop-waisted day dress, and her hair fell in smooth lines of either side of her face.

A picture.

Her eyes flickered up to his, and she smiled. "Hungry?"

"Ravenous."

"Hurting?"

"Dying."

"Good day?"

"It is now."

She pushed a tiny cup of sake towards him, the tips of their forefingers brushing briefly as he accepted the drink. The skin she'd touched felt strangely numb, as if it had been scalded. He smirked; it seemed his brain had decided that even clichés were applicable in this case. But now she was tracing the rim of her sake cup with a finger, her face open and shut at the same time. He wondered at the enigma she presented, at whether he was actually reading emotions on her face or just the pretty pictures she wanted him to see. Her eyes were dark brown, darker than his, and they reflected the lights like oil on water.

"You left," he pointed out. "When you said you wouldn't."

"I had somewhere to be."

"Some other bathroom waiting?" His tone was light, but the question was weighted.

She shook her head. "I needed to think, to make sure...to make sure that I was doing the right thing in asking you here today." She idly tapped her drink against his and drained the small receptacle, a half-hearted '_kanpai_' her only explanation. "I'm not half as much of a whore as you must think I am."

"You're forgetting that I know you."

"Through and through?" She charged.

"Through and through," he repeated.

"Then we're going to have to have a few rules."

"Like what?" He asked, unconsciously following her train of thought to its inevitable conclusion. "No shirt, no shoes, that kind of thing? Because while I'm all for no shirts, the sensation of your heels digging into my back last night was actually quite enjoyable."

"I meant like no names, no phone numbers."

"Oh? You're content with your clandestine little notes?"

"It adds a touch of respectability to the proceedings. I'm not your booty call, you know."

"Then what are you?"

She leaned towards him, sake scenting her breath and laughter sparkling in her eyes. "I'm your everything."

She was quicker than he had given her credit for, and the idea of an arrangement with November was certainly...alluring. Chuck considered her for a moment, noting the soft flush just dying over her cheekbones, the tilt of her head to one side as she studied his study of her. Her lips shone with the remnants of rice wine, and he was halfway through warring with the desire to lick it or to remain at least publicly judicious when he realised that November had that keen, lean look in her eyes once more; she was hunting him again, and she could smell his lust just as easily as he could taste hers. In that, at least, she was like any other woman – but it was there that the resemblance ended.

"You didn't order," he said aloud.

"No."

"Then what are we still doing here?"

This time it was she who took his hand, slipping the other inside his jacket to remove a bill and drop it on the table with as much nonchalance as a well broken spouse. "You like to play; now it's my roll."

Chuck could never have been bothered to be bothered about dropping a hundred dollars on two cups of sake when he was being led through the small kitchen by November's smile at every knife wielding chef she passed. The back door swung shut behind them, setting them loose into a grim expanse of bare brick wall and dumpsters, crates of empty bottles stacked high on either side of the door and drenching them both in an atmospheric shadow and the stench of too much liquor. He refrained from an outright look of disgust, settling instead for a slightly less gauche quirk of the brow. "Why would you ever want to come out here?"

"Because I like people to hear," she replied, leading him to the less revolting of the vista's two corners, barely out of view of the street. "And see. What's the use of having a secret if no one's watching you to keep it?"

"And you chose this place because?"

"All restaurants have these charming little alleyways. You just have to know which way to go." She shot him a flashing look, a quarter of a smile. "And here, luckily, I do."

There was a sway of her hips as she turned and he grabbed her, pulling her body flush against his and folding her hair into his fist. She sighed as he ran his fingers teasingly over her scalp, hissed as he pulled, let herself be kissed and licked and bitten up and down her throat with the kind of dreamy, cunning complacency of one who has been planning this all along. He ran his fingers up the cool contours of her thighs, and she bucked as they slipped and fused, quicker than either thought possible. There was a sense of kismet, of synergy, of inevitability, though this second time felt simultaneously like the very first time and the very last. Chuck took the time while she was rising and burning, brighter than a star to explore the sharp white shoulders, the slender arms which he caressed from wrist to elbow and back again. She was almost silent, only keening slightly when the rhythm changed, ebbed, increased, pushing her head back into the crook of his shoulder with her eyes tightly closed as she inhaled and then forced all the air from her lungs, flying away from him and trembling, then suddenly still as her end came, written on her face and in the motions of her body more clearly than the writing that ringed them, scrawled on the brick walls.

It took a little while for Chuck to loose his grip on November and for her legs to stop quaking, but she stayed precisely where she was and only blinked upwards at the leaden sky.

"You didn't come," she accused.

He smirked, pushed against her in a way that made her eyes roll. "I was busy watching you."

"You're a pervert."

"And you're ready to go again."

"Red or white wine?"

"White. Spain or Italy?"

"Italy. On top or underneath?"

"Anywhere."

She shook back her hair and twisted in a way which made his voice hoarse and the next half hour one of the most erratic and erotic of his life.

_**~#~**_

Chuck was unusually courteous in his business meeting that afternoon, unusually quiet and unusually tranquil. After the ruckus of the night before and the relative ease of today's rendezvous, he was feeling unexpectedly mellow, but nonetheless irritated at the actions of those who surrounded him. These board members, so sycophantic to his face when behind his back they were plotting, always plotting; he knew that they still believed that his father's company would fare far better in the hands of someone older, more experienced, more ready for the cutthroat world of business than a boy who had never even been to college. Chuck, however, had been born cutthroat, and therefore felt not even the slightest stirrings of guilt as he leaned forward to rest his elbows on the glass topped table and intrude – ever so delicately, of course – into the conversation.

"As much as I am enjoying this little repartee, it still begs the question as to why our stock has dipped so dramatically. I've been noticing a downturn ever since we announced our interest in the Asian market. Ben –" He flipped one finger at the only unlined face stationed around the table, watched the young analyst's Adam's apple bob as he swallowed. "Suggested that we publicise our plans, so Ben is the one who will be fired. I think that concludes today's business, don't you?"

The faint brackets around Lily van der Woodsen's mouth constricted as he rose, sweeping an info docket from the table to read along with his mid-afternoon scotch. Stunned looks beamed back at Chuck from every angle, and he took the time to pat the dumbstruck Ben on the shoulder as he left, taking care only to apply the merest pinch of salt to his former employee's wound.

"Didn't you go to Yale or something?"

Once outside the conference room, with office lackies running in every direction in the hope of not attracting attention to themselves at this, the hub of the wheel, Chuck revealed what the info docket had been taken in order to conceal: another neatly folded note, warm in his palm, that he had promised her faithfully not to read until he had 'let real life take over for at least half an hour'. Her script was neat, he noted, and precise, while his own slanted and sloped and was irregular even between pages.

_Saks  
Matthew Williamson display  
Third dressing room along  
11 AM  
Mention 'vanity' to the attendant_

He curled the paper in his fist as Ben's gaze burned through the glass wall and into his back, and silently pressed the button that called for security.

_**~#~**_

"Where were you today?" Serena asked curiously, twisting a grape from the bunch the two girls were sharing as they crossed campus towards Hamilton House. "First of all you were stressing about what to wear to Psychology of Business, and then you missed the class and were gone all afternoon."

Blair shrugged. "I had some errands to run."

"Oh, really?" Serena caught a strand of her friend's dark hair and tugged lightly. "Is that why you were at Gil Ferrer this morning instead of in Economics?"

"I wanted to look my best for Professor Brewster this afternoon."

"Please." Serena's eyes were blue, brighter beneath a tentative sun, and teasing. "There's something – or, more accurately someone – that you don't want to tell me about."

"Is not."

"Is too."

"Is not."

"Stop lying and eat your grapes."

Blair offered a smile and a shrug. "No thanks. I already ate."

"B," Serena said quietly. "I know you're doing it again. Dorota calls me every time the water starts running in your bathroom."

Distance descended between the two girls, as sudden as a rainstorm.

"Dorota knows nothing," Blair said coldly. "And neither do you. There is nothing wrong with me, Serena, and there is no one new in my life because I, unlike you, do not feel the need to surround myself with quasi-available men and _professors_ – yes, I know about Professor Forrester – to feel good about myself." She folded her arms, curving her too willowy body away from her friend's gaze. "I had an appointment this afternoon with my parent's financier, and then I had to make some calls about selling off the last of our art collection. Are you satisfied?"

"Blair, I –"

But Blair was gone, stalking back the way they had come with her freshly styled hair swinging over her shoulders. Serena knew all too well where she was going, what she was going to do, and that no amount of pleading on her part could stop it; what she did not know, however, was that when Blair stripped off her dress before the bathroom mirror to survey her 'progress', she would run her fingers over the dainty protuberances of her hipbones and smile unexpectedly at the pale pink line of nail marks marring her flesh. Even as she reached for her toothbrush, she would find happiness in his final, perfectly stolen words of the day: '_this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship._'

So even as the hollowness cleansed her of another day's takings, she laughed.

* * *

_**Your reviews, alerts and favourites mean so much to me - I know you probably get this from every author, but it's true! You taking the time to tell me what you think or that you're excited about what's to come means the world****, and brightens up even the bluest of Blue Mondays. I have the first of my two Biology exams tomorrow (two now, two**** at the end of June), so your comments have been a saving grace**** in this dark time of revising!  
Thanks and sake sipping Chucks to (for both chapter one and the preface):**_** Poisoned Princess, MegamiTenchi, QueenBee10, z0ey, Lolavie, bethaboo, SaturnineSunshine, TriGemini, D, notoutforawalk, Kas, READER120, Stella296, blair4eva, HnM skinnys, anabella-chair, Dr. GG, Kensley-Jackson, Poinsettia _and _comewhatmay.x. _To all the old hats, it's lovely to hear from you. To all the new ones, it's fab to meet you. Now that I have your names...you know what to do._**


	4. Kill The Lights

**3. Kill The Lights**

"...and of course we have our special range of _Péché Capital_ lingerie, including the thirty five thousand dollar demi-cup with diamond accents." The attendant blinked becomingly up at Chuck, who curled his lip as if he had decided to smile and then thought better of it. "Is there anything else I can help you with, sir?"

"Yes," he replied smoothly. "I was wondering if you had anything in the way of _vanity_ in this department."

She looked as if she might scowl, but swiftly tucked her keys into her back pocket and exited, casually accepting the rolled bill from between his fingers as she did so. The neat blonde bob flickered behind her and her hips swung subtly, but Chuck had no desire to watch what did not interest him walk away. He had just spent a gruelling hour and a half trying to explain his actions of the previous night's press conference to the board, who had not been impressed with his flagrant dismissal of Russell Thorpe as a competitor. Russell's daughter Raina had been in the front row, stony faced, and Chuck recalled that they had fucked once – regrettably – and that at least now he would need no excuse as to why he did not wish to repeat the experience.

November was waiting.

The third curtain was deep blue, long enough for the privacy of any number of persons who might have been in the office sized cubicle. She stood before the mirror, gently twisting from side to side to admire the effect of a black lace set which made his tongue dry and his blood roar.

"Can I help mademoiselle with anything?"

"Yes." She looked at his reflection in the full length mirror, and a smile curled up her pretty lips. "I was planning on wearing this for someone, but I'm not sure what kind of effect it'll have. What do you think?" Her body curved as she leaned forward, displaying a little more cleavage with a coy pout. "I mean, your honest opinion."

His honest opinion was that his pants were about to split. "My honest opinion?"

"Yes."

"Take it off."

She gave a small sigh, as if she'd been so hoping he _wouldn't_ say that, and then unclasped the bra and slipped it down her arms, letting the translucent garment dangle from one finger before dropping it. He watched it fall before waxing possessive, running his eyes along the sweeps of her rising ribs and bare belly. She was perfectly formed, he observed, her small breasts delicately curved and trim, unexpected hips gracing his eyes as she wriggled out of the panties and kicked them off one foot. Then he noticed something else, and it made his jaw set like stone.

"What is that?"

A white circle marred the skin over her coccyx, smaller than his little fingernail but still evident under the fluorescents. Her fingers drifted unconsciously over it, and then she raised an eyebrow at the man in the mirror.

"Maureen Vanderbilt likes pain – she enjoys it. I must have been fifteen, so she was nineteen or so. My first visit to the Vanderbilt compound, they pulled me aside and took me away with them, plied me with champagne: the First Wives' Club. 'Mistress, hooker, lover, whatever; we're the ones with all the power'." Her quotation was fluid, but still her fingertips worried that spot. "Every woman married to a Vanderbilt politician has a brand like this."

"Brand?"

"They do it with a cigarette."

"That's twisted."

"Perhaps. But then, we all thought we were going to marry the right man and live forever, so more fool us."

"Who?" A fragment of a question, but a fool would know its ending.

"That's none of your business," she replied crisply. "You don't want to know, I don't want you to know. The past doesn't exist, the future doesn't matter and the present should really be focused on the fact that I'm naked and you kept me waiting rather than on some silly gang initiation from years ago."

Chuck was disinclined to agree with her, but he was also averse to disagreeing and having her turn on him with the scorn she had exhibited so many times when she hadn't known he was watching – to power grabbing sluts and whores and Lower East Siders – full of the black snap of her eyes when they were too empty to be brown, the drawing back from them as if they were lepers and she, a princess, did not wish to be infected with such poverty of grace. He adored her arrogance, he realised, and the way she would take a scorch mark in return for wrapping the world around her little finger.

"This...Vanderbilt." He caught the hand still behind her back and twisted her, and her breath caught as her naked chest met his clothed front. "How far could he take you?"

"As far as you can. You're nothing special."

"You're lying. Your eyes are doing that thing where they don't match your mouth."

"Don't act like you know me."

"I do know you. I know how you feel."

"I feel nothing for you."

"That's strange."

"Why?"

"Because I can still feel your heart beating too fast."

She groaned as he ran his tongue along the curve of her lower lip, pushing against her teeth in a way that was equal parts pleading and domination. Her mouth opened even as he ran his thumb over her nipple, coaxing it to a rough peak which drew out more indistinct sounds. Her arms wound around his neck and she stretched up on her toes to lean into the kiss, the length of her fragile little body up against his. There was a line between master and slave, and they were walking it; she may have bewitched him with her body, but she was still powerless to resist her own lust. They staggered backwards, a shudder rocking through her as her back hit the cold glass of the mirror and Chuck wondered if he was subconsciously trying to soothe that long ago bestowed burn. The thought that November could have been – and perhaps still was – one of _those_ girls, with their committees and their headbands and their perfect dinner parties where everyone was screwing someone they shouldn't be was almost laughable.

"I have no heart," she whispered, one hand expertly navigating his waistband and ghosting her fingers across him to punish and electrify. "Not where you're concerned."

He snarled, slamming her harder into the glass and forcing the air from her lungs. "Take it back."

November's eyes were glittering. "I always forget your _Fatal_ _Attraction_ style attachment to me when I'm fucking you; it's too good to focus on the negatives." She laughed lightly, then pressed her lips to his ear. "Do you still watch me, Charlie? Do you still follow my every move? Does it make you hard? Do you pretend that your hand is mine, my hand or my mouth or just me, too hot not to burn you and tighter than hell? Well, Charlie –" She nipped at his earlobe for good measure. "Do you?"

Chuck bit her so fiercely that she shrieked, right in the juncture between throat and shoulder. He felt his teeth break the skin and she slapped him once, hard, so he felt more than justified in forcing apart her legs and pushing into her even harder, provoking a raw gasp as she pushed her face further into his neck. He moved fast, too fast for her keep pace, so fast that desperation lit up her eyes in a matter of moments as she whimpered and buried her face in his jacket, no longer moaning but only chanting, begging for nothing with her 'please, please, please's. He slowed every time she seemed on the edge, ripe to fall, forcing her into agony as her body contracted uselessly against a force that was no longer there. Only when sweat dewed her brow and her eyelids had shut did he finally slip a hand between them and finish what he'd started, ending them both together with one last slam of her spine against the mirror which made the weak wall shake.

"Don't," he said quietly, even as she came down in a haze of tiny aftershocks. "Don't mock me for wanting you."

She was panting still, but now her eyes were challenging. "Why?"

"Because I don't want you to."

Her look was steady for a long moment, and then she carefully tucked her head beneath his chin and pressed her mouth to the tender skin of his throat. "Again," she whispered, though the last time had not yet finished toying with her. "Please."

_**~#~**_

Chuck breathed out. "I killed my mother," he told her as they lay on the floor, backs hard up against the soft carpet.

"How? Gun? Knife? Bleach? Rope? Machete?"

"I was born."

She blinked twice up at the ceiling, as if it might afford her the correct response. She occasionally behaved so like a society girl that he was sure she must have been born into money, even if it evaded her now. "I walked in on my father kissing another man when I was sixteen."

"How did your mother take it?"

"With plastic surgery and a new midget husband."

"How Freudian."

"They both live in France: Daddy and Roman in a chateau in the wine country, and Mother and Cyrus in Paris."

"You don't see them?"

"My mother calls occasionally to ask why one of her highly prized originals is up at Sotheby's, then tells me I should give up the apartment to keep the damn things. What about your father?"

"Dead."

"How uncomplicated."

"He didn't like me being underfoot when I was growing up, so he kept me in my mother's bedroom. All the shades were closed the day she died and I was never allowed to open them."

"So you stayed in the dark?"

"So I stayed in the dark."

Not a word was spoken as she closed her fingers over his, and silently she squeezed. "Don't forgive him," she said. "Don't pretend it was for your own good, that he wanted what was best for you. It's never true and it won't help, believe me."

"Who says I need help?"

"I do."

"Why?"

"Because you stalk girls based on their birth dates and follow them to the stores they like to steal from. You act like this is normal for you, but then you practically break my back for questioning why it is you would go so far when you know what I am, what I'm not." She rolled over to face him, a movement he mirrored. "And your name isn't Charlie. It's something like Charlie, but it isn't Charlie."

He felt a stab of semi-guilt at the sight of the still scarlet bite mark on her neck, but quickly dismissed it. "What makes you say that?"

She shrugged. "I've never seen a Charlie like you. You had maybe a second to come up with that name, so it's either the name of someone you know very well or it's something someone once called you, and you remember it because you told them never to call you it again – and you're also not a Charlie because Charlies _do_ have close friends and people around them, meaning that my second guess is the right one."

"Astute," he remarked.

"I'm a thief. It's my job to be."

Chuck felt a bizarre desire welling up inside him, and upon seizing it did the oddest thing. He pressed his two thumbs just beneath November's jaw, at the right angle where ear met chin, and then he kissed her so very gently that it seemed to be almost more of a breath than a kiss. He kept his eyes closed for a very long time afterward, and from the flicker of her lashes he could feel her doing the same. How strange this was, he and she, so close together but without the slightest inkling of the truths and lies of the other's lives. He could have pulled together pieces from what she'd told him, but he couldn't surface from his reverie long enough to care.

"If I hurt you," he murmured. "I'm sorry."

She said nothing, merely kissed his chin as if she were worried what his mouth might do. "I have to go."

"Meeting of the First Wives' Club?" He opened his eyes to catch her stillborn grin.

"I need to go shopping. In order to go shopping, I need cash. In order to get cash –"

"You need to go to work," he completed, pulling her to her feet and handing her the dress hanging on the back of the door with something like acceptance. "I know how you operate, beautiful, I know."

_**~#~**_

"Blair!" Maureen cried, her sweet face breaking into a smile as false as her wedding ring as she saw her former protégée mounting the steps. "How great to see you, you're looking so well!"

Two and a half salmon puffs choked down the toilet would do that for you.

Blair smiled and laid her cool cheek against Maureen's. "It's been too long. It must have been – gosh, your wedding since I saw you last! How's William? How's Tripp, he must be quite the congressman by now." She let her fingers slip into the flashy purse swinging from her quarry's arm, making big eyes and appropriate noises as the newest Mrs Vanderbilt prattled on and on about Tripp's aspirations and William's patronage and how terribly fortunate she was to be in such a position. Still, Blair could recall the scorching pain of the cigarette, brightening like a muzzle flash against her back as the older girl's tongue had forced apart her teeth in a reckless caress that the others had giggled over but had been all too eager to visit upon their new compatriot.

She had long ago learned to count with her fingers, and she shuffled a neat stack of bills and several credit cards before slipping them into her palm and withdrawing. "Maureen, so lovely to see you, but I'm afraid I must dash..."

"Will we see you at Nate's birthday party?"

"Wouldn't miss it," Blair called gaily, knowing full well as she walked away that she never wanted to be in that room or even that house ever again. She had paid the price of ascending to the stars; she would rather clutch at straws down here, in the real world, than risk that ring of fire once again. Even as this phrase occurred to her, her lips briefly burned, and Blair touched her fingertips to the blazing skin and wondered at that one tender kiss.

_**~#~**_

Her note crackled in his suit jacket as he slid it back on.

_The Met Steps  
Tomorrow  
Midnight  
Wear black tie  
Bring back my panties, please_

Chuck vowed to wear the lacy article as a pocket square, and laughed softly under his breath.

* * *

_**Well, I hope that was your satisfaction. I was so amused by all of you who told me vehemently that Chuck '**__is _**not_ Charlie!' that I decided to have Blair make a point of it. You're right, he's not a Charlie - but he's not a real Chuck yet either, the same way Blair has a way to go before she's the real Blair. Are you ready to play that game?  
I have never been to Saks, and it is probably far nicer with fewer easily bribed attendants than I have described. In any case, thanks and marauding, insanely possessive Chucks to:_ Missy06, QueenBee10, xoxogg4lifexoxo, hiddenletter, blair4eva, Stella296, SaturnineSunshine, MegamiTenchi, cherrygirl, READER120, Petite Poppy, D, , notoutforawalk, bethaboo, CBfan, anabella-chair, Poinsettia, LovelyAmanda _and_ louboutinlove._ You all bring me far too much joy.  
As for any fans of _The Fire Below_ who might be hovering, I hope you enjoyed the allusion I included (did you notice? Can you find it?) Thank you so much for your support both on that story and this, and thank you to all the new readers too - if you have enough courage and faith to enter the mire of my mind, you are certainly a far braver soul than most.__  
_**


	5. She Happened One Night

**4. She Happened One Night**

"Hello?"

"Blair, darling! How are you?"

This was how their conversations always started: a 'darling' and a 'how are you' before she launched into the inevitable, the deep breath before the plunge. Blair had no idea when she had first started to resent her mother, only that she did; in fact, she now did so with such a passion that even the sound of Eleanor's voice took her to a darker place inside her own head, filled with the echoes of slamming doors and fruitless tears from her childhood. She remembered the day her mother had seen her brand, and how much she had wanted to be screamed and berated instead of the cool, 'well done, dear' she had received for the pain, the sickening smell of her flesh charring. It was enough to make her vomit.

And so it began.

"Ninety three, Mother," Blair replied, knowing full well that it was the only statistic that mattered when it came to her welfare. "And I'm due to start a cleanse tomorrow morning."

"Ninety three?" The words seemed to scrape over each other as Eleanor chewed on them. "Well, of course that's excellent...but I saw the most divine Maxime Simoens today, and I know it would look just right on a ninety. Can you do that, Blair?"

"Can I do what?"

"Be a ninety!" And there was the irritation, as ever. Blair bit down on her lip.

"Of course. But I'll have to start putting in the extra work tomorrow, I'm afraid."

"Why in the world would you delay making yourself happy, darling? You know this is what you want, what you've always wanted, what I've always wanted for you..."

The skin on her arm had little enough flesh beneath it, but still Blair pinched it and watched the angry red weal formed by her nails with a shot of sharp satisfaction. "I can't tonight, Mother. I have an appointment with...with a friend." She pinched the skin again, watched it flush and felt the sting. The minutes were already ticking down in her head as Eleanor talked on, right beside the counter that was always there: the minutes until she was perfect, until she was exactly what the famed Eleanor Waldorf wanted her to be.

She thought of the stench of ash on her flesh, and her stomach heaved.

_**~#~**_

"Midnight," he said, mounting the steps and watching her long skirt flicker in the light breeze. "Not the most social of hours."

"No." She was facing the traffic, but still he caught the slight twist of her smile.

As requested, Chuck had dressed in flawless Armani, though he had restrained his tendency towards the more outlandish levels of sartorial excellence and stuck to black on black. He wondered how long it would take her to notice the wisp of lace peeping oh so suggestively from his top pocket – she hadn't yet turned, but he was sure she already knew, the covetous gaze of the thief far outstripping that of the society girl. He didn't know quite what to compare her to, standing there in that strange and beautiful dress: cascading like a waterfall from deepest blue into ice white.

He wanted to touch her and see if she was still real.

Slowly she turned, and long diamonds swung from her ears. "I guess you're wondering why I asked you here, instead of some hotel or convenient alleyway."

"Yes."

"I wanted to take you to the opera."

He blinked, and she smiled.

"There's a telephone booth across from the dress circle. It's infamous in certain circles."

"I know it."

"You do?"

This time, it was his turn to smile. "I made it infamous."

She cast her eyes silently over his face, still too far away for a physical touch but close enough that her bare skin seemed to radiate heat and scorch him. Chuck looked back at her and felt oddly ashamed; ashamed that there had been others, others who had chosen to see the romance in a situation she took at face value, accepting him – in a twisted sort of way – for what he was. Their world was separate from the real one, different and distinct, and yet still she studied him as if she were planning to write a paper on the subject.

"Tell me something," she said aloud.

"What?"

"Where are my panties?"

The moment passed, and Chuck could have laughed at himself as he grabbed her hand, pulling her down the steps with a sudden urgent need to immerse them both in a place that was more like him than it was her, and therefore more sane. "Come with me."

"Where are we going?"

"You'll see."

The air smelled of cigarette smoke, liquor, sex; the lights pulsated dizzily, and the girls bent their spines into shapes which were sickening to the stomach and crippling on the pulse. The place was a haven of dark corners, dark alcoves, barely restrained dark decadence, velvet and leather and silk, no questions asked and no names given. It was his place, a place where there was no Bass Industries, no dead father, no death mother to be reproached for; money could burn and the party would go on.

Victrola.

"What is this place?"

November was halfway to enchantment already, turning on the spot to take it in. Her dress flared out around her, at odds with the rest of the room, and impulsively he caught hold of it. The delicate material voided easily beneath his fingertips, triumphing in a split from seam to thigh, the flash of her legs and the flash of shock on her face equally acceptable and arousing.

"That was Monique Lhuillier," she told him coolly.

"You weren't dressed for the occasion."

Her eyes flickered to the floor and back up again. He saw her through a camera lens in his mind and immortalised the deceptive coyness.

"Dance with me."

She raised an eyebrow. "This is a filthy burlesque club."

"And you're wearing a newly scandalous dress."

"I don't like to dance in the dark."

"So look into the light."

He had been taught to waltz, to tango, and she had certainly received the same education. Yet here they were, in a filthy club (_his_ filthy club), with lights flickering over five thousand dollar suits and unreasonably priced dresses. He felt the need to trash her, to ruin her a little better and a little worse, to induct her into this new world that she might better understand him. She gave a little gasp as he turned her, her back to his front, perfect curves with his hands on her hips as she closed her eyes and swayed softly, finding the rhythm as she had found the rhythm with him before, quietly stoking the flames between them even as his hand drifted towards the rip in her dress. She gasped as his fingers flickered over her bare inner thigh, so close that the tips made her body rock to a beat far rougher than the music.

"What are you doing?"

"You like to be seen." His words were hotter than hell on the shell of her ear. "But I prefer it when nobody sees you but me."

"We're in the middle of the dance floor."

"In a place where no one gives a fuck even if they do notice."

"You like to play, don't you?" She challenged.

"Yes." He traced slick lines further upward until he met the apex, the tiny bud of an unopened flower. "I like to play with you." She closed her eyes and shuddered, and he chuckled with black satisfaction and pressed down with his thumb. "Now dance."

Blair looked up into the light.

She looked into the light and let its intensity burn her face and blind her.

He had drawn her into this undignified, dirty place where women rippled for the entertainment of men and curtains masked indiscreet sounds she knew because she had at times made them herself. She felt herself being parted with a sibilant hiss, felt the casual jolt of entrance and then the creeping pleasure of being stroked, of roaring like a lion into life. His fingers were deft, talented and somehow artless, two fingers playing the body of the notes while his thumb kept pace with the chords. Every staccato tap, every tiny swirl of push-pull of her flesh forced her a little more into him, made her a little more desperate, caused her to buck as his teeth grazed her shoulder. First she closed her eyes, and then she found she could not; she was compelled to look into the light by the most seductive of daring whispers in her ear, by the strange man who stood behind her and played her like he knew her. The tempo of the music changed, and so did he. The lights pulsed faster.

Faster.

Faster.

Chuck felt her climax in the strangulation of his fingers, the sudden tautness in her body before the softness of relief overcame her and made her soft around him. Surely there could be no higher pleasure than the stillness around them and the thrill of taboo, in the greed and gluttony and lust for more even as he heard a familiar voice and his head turned on autopilot.

Nate was approaching across the dance floor, and he was still two fingers deep in the girl with starry eyes.

"Real life," he murmured. "Is intruding."

She cast a look back at him over her shoulder, chest still rising and falling with each rapid exhalation. "If you want me to move fast, you might want to take your hand out of me first."

"Bitch."

"Pussy."

He kept hold of her and dragged her out, away from the boy who was weaving his way through the crowd and yet might be their undoing. Chuck withdrew from her with a small sigh from both parties, and she gave him a glittering look as he pushed her towards the door.

"Hail a cab and make it wait."

"And what if I don't feel like waiting for you?"

Her back hit the wall and kissed her once, fiercely, hard, so sharply and deeply that she clapped one hand to her mouth as if to soothe the burn. "You'll wait for me."

He saw her through the door with the victory of their night evident in the sheen on her bared thighs, then backtracked through the crowd to find his friend. Nate was standing in almost exactly the same spot he and November had been a few moments previously, and Chuck was surprised when his friend threw an arm around his shoulders and gave him a brief back-slapping hug. "Man, it's good to see you! Where have you been all this time? My mother said she saw you at her benefit, I was sorry to miss you...who's the girl, Chuck?" His blue eyes were utterly guileless, his smile genuine; Chuck sometimes wondered how they had ever become friends at all, one all smiles and one all snarls.

"She's someone," he said ambiguously, and Nate grinned his approval.

"Come and have a drink."

"It's my club."

"So I'm buying."

"And I'm busy." He darted a look back at the doorway, but it was still empty of blue and white skirted angels or demons or women in general. "So as much as I'd like to stay and catch up –"

"Duty calls." The smile was now lopsided, crooked with the nostalgia of the same excuse one too many times. "Take care, man."

"You too."

It almost wasn't enough to push people out of his way to get back through the door and out into the chilly New York pre-dawn, but when he did the wind hit him like a punch to the gut. There were so many cabs waiting up and down the street, so many lights blinking. He looked for her blindly, incapable of catching the bird of paradise among the pigeons, incapable of anything until small hands covered his eyes and warm, prettily encased breasts pressed against his ribs. The blood sped through his veins and he regretted the layers of clothing between them.

"Guess who?"

"You."

"Who am I?"

"You're everything."

There was a feather light touch on the nape of his neck as she drew back, applauding the reference to their first meeting. He turned and had draped his coat over her shoulders before even thinking about taking it off.

"Where?"

"You know where I live, don't you?"

He knew the sounds she made when she came, but he knew that too. "Yes."

"There. Fair is fair –" Her fingers stitched into his hair, pulling his face down towards hers. A kiss hung between them, too intimate for the moment and the tableau they presented. Her skin glowed beneath the streetlights. "And I want you now."

He closed his eyes briefly, considered the shape of her lips by memory alone. "A room? A bed? Surely that's a little passé."

"Hush." They breathed the same air, but still she would not kiss him. "I like to be watched, and you like to see. You like to follow, so I'll lead you." Her lips pressed against his as he opened his mouth, effectively birthing her own truth and gently consuming any protest. Chuck opened his eyes as she pulled back, and November smirked. "I'll drag you all the way to hell if I have to."

* * *

**_Sorry for the wait, Virtue Hellions - I'm midway through my exams and have been feeling very blocked lately (damn you, mere five seconds of Chair interaction in Damien Darko!), so Charlie and November haven't been able to come out and play as often as they might like. They too apologise for their absence, and hope that this chapter restores your faith in their ability to do it anywhere, anytime.  
Yes, I gave Victrola a dance floor; I'm a burlesque genie. Thanks and dress ripping (I've had a lot of jokes about the lack of bodice ripping in my prior fics, so this one's to make up the deficit) Chucks to:_ MegamiTenchi, SaturnineSunshine, Lalai, blair4eva, QueenBee10, queen'scat, xoxogg4lifexoxo, CBfan, flipped, D, Poinsettia, Dr. GG, READER120, notoutforawalk, Stella296 _and_ Skatious. _A special shout out also to my couture consultant _comewhatmay.x_, without whom Blair would not have a dress to be ripped out of.  
Why don't you all take a man after midnight...you know what I want in return._**


	6. Speedball

**_This chapter contains one brief instance of Schedule II/Class A drug use_****_.  
_**

* * *

**5. Speedball**

He'd been here before, in his own head, stumbling past the plush couches and piano and the lights which seemed to flicker when he closed his eyes, opened them again, closed them and opened them once more to see her lips part as she laughed at him, suddenly so in control of the two of them in her own element with her entire life around them – still silent, still secret, and still the only undesirable element of their being together. Chuck barely felt the stairs beneath his feet as November pulled him up them, the scraps of her dress fluttering as she skipped ahead, covering his eyes with her fingers before leading him into her bedroom.

The air was tinged with her perfume, and he was on her.

They hit the floor hard, so hard that she squeaked as the air was knocked from her lungs. It didn't matter that she broke skin on his shoulders clawing his shirt off, that there were half-moons of blood beneath her fingernails or that she was still laughing. All that mattered was that she was atop him, her back arching in the pale glow from the window, the exquisite waterfall colours of her dress torn to shreds. Her back arched, and he groaned, and she ran her fingers across his brow as if trying to soothe the pleasure away.

It was almost ironic that the bed was so close.

He splayed his fingers across her ribs, surprised by deeper creases running between them and defining every curve of bone. Her slightness was exotic in the otherwise empty room where she slept and worked and dreamed; was he dreaming, still? Her hair swept his chest, already pulled from its intricate knot as she bent to kiss him and he held on to her, slowing the motions of her body until she whimpered, whispered, begged.

The sunrise that morning was gradual, erotic, burning as slowly across the sky as the aching orgasm which curled her toes and spent her energy and broke his body as she purred and he watched and followed. Chuck knew he should be worried about Nate; he couldn't bring himself to, though, when November had fallen asleep in the crook of his arm, her body bent awkwardly with her knees still either side of him.

His phone rang, and he cursed it. "Yes?"

"Charles? It's Lily."

"It's not even seven."

"I know that." Her voice was clipped, curt, but tinged with something Chuck certainly did not want to hear. "Charles, it's about the Asian markets."

"What about them?" He eyed the girl sleeping half on and half beside him, carefully brushed back a strand of her hair. "I fired Boring Ben, we fixed the problem."

"Ben wasn't the problem."

"Then what?"

"The shareholders backed his entry into Asia because they thought your refusal to take the risk wasn't in the company's best interest. As it was, almost half of our on-hand capital was consumed by our failures there."

"So?"

"Charles." There was that nuance again, somewhere between anxiety and pity and a darker place of care that Chuck had never been exposed to and never wanted to explore. He felt cold as she spoke, stifled by the presence of the warm body around him, crushed by her diminutive weight. His breathing kicked into hyperventilation as Lily continued, "I didn't want to have to be the one to say this...but you ought to get down here now if you want to save the company. I've called an emergency meeting of the board members."

His phone hit the floor on the way out, and he didn't even care.

_**~#~**_

Blair came into awareness slowly, hardly surprised by the fact that she was a) naked, b) cold and c) alone. She was curled on her bedroom floor, still with a slight sheen of sweat coating her skin, still sticky between her thighs with the pleasant feeling of soreness which accompanied triumph. Her previous sexual encounters had been few and on the whole unmemorable; she had been having sex just to have it, it seemed to her, enjoying utterly selfish climaxes with no thought as to the feelings of her partner. Nate had been her first, the very sweetest...but that was still no match for the screaming satisfaction she found from sex with a person she might never truly claim to know.

It didn't bother her.

She opened her eyes slowly, allowing herself the leisure of slowness and a catlike stretch which stretched her taut, empty belly. There was no need for a visit to the bathroom, she hadn't eaten anything the night before. She blinked twice, and slowly the object on the floor beside her came into focus.

A phone.

His phone.

November (who she was beginning to think of as her other, better self) hadn't had time to write him a note, and this was too much temptation.

Careful to avoid anything that could relate to its owner's identity, Blair awoke the dark screen and assessed the wallpaper: her, of course. It was a little disconcerting sometimes to remember that, to all intents and purposes, the poorly named 'Charlie' had stalked her. In the darker parts of her mind, she sometimes wondered what would have happened if she hadn't wanted him too. But that was irrelevant, she reminded herself, and there was no use imagining what could have been when it hadn't. Besides, he cared too much to hurt her, of that she was sure.

_Contacts_

Truthfully? Far too much temptation.

She skipped to the Bs (where better to begin than with her own favourite letter?) and let the list slowly scroll. It had reached about halfway when she paused, an interesting entry winking slowly in a highlighted blue bar.

_Blackberry (own)_

Blair justified it by telling herself that she had no other way of contacting him. He might not even have his Blackberry, after all, might not even pick it up. She typed slowly, repeating the same rationalisations, making the email in the same vein as her previous notes. She was even smiling slightly as she hit _Send_.

_**~#~**_

_Victrola  
(It's not such a niche place as you think)  
Today  
Whenever you're free  
I never did say thank you for the dance_

Chuck had never needed the place so much, never needed the promise of the boy he had been more than he did now. Hours bent over the figures, roaring at every secretary or accountant who crossed his path had led to nothing but endless rounds of coffee and an unreasonable resentment towards Lily van der Woodsen. He was now feeling unpleasantly buzzed, and was glad that the club was closed for the night. Its slight aroma of sweat and smoke was strangely restful, and he assumed the couch directly in front of the stage with a sigh, closing his eyes.

"Do you want to talk, or..."

"No talking."

Her heels clicked up the stairs to the stage in a series of ascendant beats, rising to greet the music that was suddenly pumping from nowhere. Lights flickered behind his eyelids: red, pink, green.

Chuck opened his eyes.

She was on stage, watching him, her lips bright and her skin pulsating with bars of colour. What she was wearing was hardly important, but it interested him: pale green lace, awkwardly fitted, a slender black bow marking the curve of her throat. She looked too young and too old, both at the same time, frozen in time with too many dark curls and a headband instead of a crown.

"I've changed my mind."

"What?"

"Talk," he said hoarsely. "Say anything."

"I have a best friend." November was removing the headband as she spoke, smiling coquettishly with a neat pop of her hip. "She's tall, she's blonde, she's beautiful, and my mother prefers her to me. Catch."

The headband fell short, and Chuck had to stretch for it. He raised it to his nose and inhaled the familiar scent of l'Occitane, green tea and bitter orange. "Your mother prefers your friend?"

He couldn't think of anything in the world preferable to November, to her pale skinned grace.

"Yes." She showed him her profile, raising her arms above her head and swaying gently in time to the music. Her fingers strayed to the zip, and she pulled it down in two swift tugs. He caught his breath. "Everything comes easily to Serena, and she can't help it. She got into the same college as me without even trying, she has a never-ending parade of men who adore her, and sometimes...sometimes I want to tear her perfect hair out." She turned, and the dress slid to the stage to reveal an oyster silk slip which Chuck decidedly preferred to the green monstrosity. "I'm glad you'll never meet her."

"I might one day."

"You won't," she said dangerously. The lights were swirling and she was turning, her back to him as she ran her fingers down her arms and cast a look back over her shoulder. "I won't let you."

Her muscles rippled with each movement, and as she raised her face to the lights, all tension dropped from her body. Chuck tried to think of anything else – the impending doom of his father's legacy, the cold faces of the board members, the green tinged assistants – but he was mesmerised, enchanted by the complete freedom with which she moved before him, dark lines of virginal stockings bisecting her legs above the high crimson shoes of a whore. Those shoes ought to be wrapped around a pole, he thought...or him. She certainly owed him a bruise or two.

"Your slip."

"Do you like it?"

"I worship it." He paused at the odd, little used word, and smirked. "Lose it."

"Really?" Her red painted lips were no longer smiling, but her eyes still were. "But it's so pretty..." She ran a finger along the line of whisper thin strap.

"Take it off."

"Make me."

"Come here. Come down."

The colours were whirling, catching her beaded bodice and scattering the room with stars, and Chuck found that he needed November as he had only ever before needed narcotics and scotch. The world seemed suffocating around him, with her figure as the only point of clarity as the walls were dyed red, orange, black; she tripped daintily down the stairs and sashayed towards his couch as if she hadn't stolen the clothes on her back, as if she didn't know how this was going to end. Nevertheless, the skin on her arms was lightly pebbled with gooseflesh, and she bit her lip as she reached the couch and stood before him, looking half as if she expected a reprimand. He beckoned and she knelt on the plush velvet beside him, leaning forward but pulling back with her eyes half open and her thighs captured between his knees.

"I find myself..." Her voice hovered in a no man's land, half purr, half whisper. "Wanting to know things about you – the important things – but I don't know where we draw the line."

"What do you want to know?"

She laid her hand on the curve of his cheek and he gripped her waist, both suddenly in perfect synergy as she considered. "Like if you play poker, or if you're too careful for it; what your drink is, if you drink, which I have no doubt that you do." One finger traced the shadow beneath his left eye, and Chuck exhaled across her palm. "Something upset you today."

"Yes."

"Can I know what it is?"

"No."

"Ah. Did you mind my message? I know it broke a rule, but I had no other way of laying hands on you."

"And you wanted to lay hands on me."

"And I wanted to lay hands on you."

"I..." He considered how to put it, owing her a debt for the feelings of inadequacy she had shared even as she stripped for him. "There was a girl, once, when I was sixteen. I was drunk and a complete asshole, and I would have forced her if her brother hadn't turned up and stopped me. He gave me a black eye, and I deserved it."

"What happened to the girl?"

"She was fine. I met her again a year or so later, and I apologised. I knew I could never apologise enough, but I apologised."

"Which makes you a good person."

Chuck's eyes had closed as he recanted this misdeed. Now he opened them, and her look was – incredibly – utterly empty, clear and still bright and still hungry. "But I would have done it. I would have – hurt her."

November stroked his cheek. "That's for her to forgive you for, not me. You and I have a clean slate, Charlie-not-Charlie; and now, if you don't mind, I'd rather like somebody to fuck me senseless so I can stop feeling second best, or second rate, or anything at all, really."

"Lie back," he told her, and the beat crescendo-ed all around them. "Close your eyes."

_**~#~**_

Peace had settled over Chuck by the time she'd left, and he leaned back and rested quietly on a seductive cloud of it. He'd bequeathed her his Blackberry – 'it's not as if I use it, it's just on' – and was now waiting with mounting anticipation for the buzz in his pocket and for her next message, short and simple as it would be.

His phone rang and it was wrong, all wrong.

"Lily."

"Charles. I want to talk to you."

"Look, I spent most of today discussing where the problem is and how we can fix it. I just need to –"

"It's not about that."

"What, then?" There was a strobe light still going, coming from nowhere, and a white streak temporarily filled his field of vision and made him blind.

"Charles, when your father died, you took charge of this company and practically married into it." Her voice had that horrible undertone again, the one he had never again hoped to hear and had been especially brusque in the hope of dispelling. "But now you're hardly ever here, I can't reach you, you seem distracted..."

"What about it?"

"I know your birthday is coming up soon."

_Your birthday_.

His birthday.

_His_ birthday.

"And I know how much –"

Chuck hurled the phone at the stage and let it smash, well and truly, genuinely smash and shatter and leave shards all over the polished floor. His head was suddenly pounding – why was it pounding? – filled with black and white photographs of a woman, the same woman, the same woman whose living, breathing, possibly flawed or lined face he had never been able to see. He kept his gaze focused straight ahead as he dug beneath the velvet couch cushion with one hand, extracting a tiny bag of all too recognisable white powder which sparkled and had no odour because it was pure, and pure was best, and pure would stop him thinking and make the pictures of his mother go away and never come back, never whiten the dark of those years in the dark.

Three lines.

Three candles on a cake.

His fingers trembled over the rolling of the bill, but snorting was easy once you'd done it even once. Chuck wiped his nose, tapped his tongue once against the roof of his mouth to eliminate the medicinal taste and closed his eyes.

An hour or two later, November stole in and kissed his cold mouth.

But then, that could have been wishful thinking.

* * *

_**In order to make this completely clear, I have never taken cocaine. I did however do some research vis-a-vis the taste and smell so that I wasn't flying completely blind - it is also a stimulant, not a hallucinogen, so whether Blair did come back and kiss Chuck or whether his escapism prompted a pleasurable dream of her, I leave up to you****.  
Thanks and oyster silk slips (I have to buy one of those, they're like sexual dynamite!) to:**_** QueenBee10, LovelyAmanda, MegamiTenchi, Stella296, blair4eva, Missy06, Kensley-Jackson, cj-the-greatest, queen'scat, flipped, notoutforawalk, CBfanhere, HnM skinnys, READER120, ellibells, SaturnineSunshine, CBLove21, Poinsettia, belle19, louboutinlove _and_ jwoo2525. _It's lovely to hear from all of you, both the old hats and the new. A special thank you to everyone for your lovely wishes for my exams.  
_**


	7. Testosterone Boys & Harlequin Girls

**6. Testosterone Boys & Harlequin Girls**

The night, the early morning, the day in and out and in and out of meetings, arguments, full out slanging matches where he smashed glass and drowned them all out with mentions of _his_ father, his father's company, the Bass legacy, of it being all and everything he had ever wanted. Chuck wondered over his ninth espresso where the hell it had all gone wrong – when did he take his eye off the ball, or when did the ball stop rolling for him and screw him over? The board members spoke of sales, the accountants of retention, the publicists of parties and balls and events to set the world straight; he could not deny that he was tempted to simply dazzle his investors back with champagne fountains and easily accessible vice. Speaking of...

"Arrange a party for tonight, at the Empire."

Katy Cunningham tapped three times on her Blackberry. "Any preferences for timing? Theme?"

Chuck straightened his tie. "I don't care. I won't be there."

She arched an insolent eyebrow. "And where will you be, if not at the party we're throwing to save your company?"

"At the Palace," he told her smoothly. "Entertaining a small group of private investors over dinner. You're not the only one with ideas around here."

"I just hope they pay off."

"I just hope you remember who pays you."

KC's blue eyes flashed downward as he paused in the doorway.

"Yes, Mr Bass."

"Better."

_**~#~**_

_The New York Palace Hotel  
455 Madison Avenue  
Suite 1812  
Six o'clock  
Dress for dinner, but don't eat_

Blair disapproved of Juliet Sharp.

She disliked her on principle – not because she was nouveau riche, but because she pretended she wasn't. She did, however, approve of her laxity with her personal possessions.

With one eye focused on the violent gesticulating her professor was doing over some particularly important chapter of _The Essays of Warren Buffett_, Blair had already scoped out the pretender's Balenciaga and was silent rummaging, occasionally smiling to herself at the surfeit of far too expensive things Juliet kept in her purse. Who else would need a diamond tennis bracelet on their person? Why, only Juliet Sharp, so she could tell the world it had been a gift from one of her Astor cousins. Who else would haul around a sizeable wad of hundred dollar bills? Why, only Juliet Sharp, someone who wanted to whine about breaking one and dropping four before the day was out.

Blair may have been a poor little rich girl, but she hated rich little poor girls with a passion.

When the interminable hour and a half was up, she considered her options. Serena had made a point of sitting across the room from her, her arms and legs crossed so tightly that it was unlikely she'd be able to straighten them out again for a good week or so. Blair sighed at the spray of afternoon light across her best friend's perfectly tanned, perfectly golden legs; why couldn't her thighs look like that while stuck to an unhygienic communal chair?

"S."

Serena looked up, and almost instantaneously looked back down again. "I haven't forgiven you."

"But you want to know what it is I'm been dying to ask you for the past forty five minutes?"

"Well...yes."

Blair almost laughed aloud. "You were right, and I'm sorry – there is a guy, and he's told me to dress for dinner but not to eat beforehand, and we're meeting in a suite at the Palace, and what the hell am I supposed to wear in that case?" She exhaled emphatically, and a strand of brown hair flew wildly away from her forehead. "And why are you smiling?"

"Because you're happy – crazy nervous, but ridiculously happy." Serena stood with a swing of her Prada satchel, the unflattering lighting glinting off her engraved initials on the clasp. She slipped her arm around her friend's waist and squeezed, leaning back and laughing with her as Blair clung on with a faint 'not enough'. "And because you and I are going to go to Bloomingdales and find the ideal dress for a dinner where you're not supposed to eat beforehand, are not actually going out anywhere but are confined to a suite at, let's face it, the second best hotel in town with a mystery man whose name I do not need to know but who definitely knows how to make you act insane."

"Are we?"

"We are."

"Am I forgiven?"

Their heads were still close together, carefree blonde and careworn brunette. That was the way it would always be, it seemed; no one had retreated, but there had hardly been a battle either.

"You're forgiven."

_**~#~**_

Stepping into the Palace was like stepping into another world. Blair was used to opulence, had made her debut at the Waldorf-Astoria and attended parties at the Plaza, but this place had the indefinable signature of royalty. She was firmly of the belief that those with real money were subtle about it (in just the way that Juliet Sharp was not) but every walnut stain and strip of marble reeked of money and oozed a little too much class – almost as if it were trying to cover its back for not dating from quite as far back as those other famous names. It reminded her of the person she was here to meet, of Charlie, who had the lean look in his dark, catlike eyes of having been reminded what money was, even if he had been raised in it.

"Mademoiselle."

She turned with her cerise mouth in a neat _moue_. "Yes?"

"The gentleman asked me to escort you to suite 1812. He said, 'all will be revealed'."

He was a good looking sort of concierge, tall and bronzed and neat in his black suit and tie. He gave Blair a little dip of his head as she deigned to join him in the elevator, but other than that they rode silently. She wondered at being 'escorted', at the risk of any name being mentioned other than 'the gentleman', but the concierge only smiled and Blair only smiled enigmatically back.

"Enjoy your evening," he offered as she exited.

"I will."

Her dress was asymmetrical, one shouldered with a dipping hem, and it swished against her legs as she walked down the short stretch of corridor and laid her palm against the door. It yielded, surprisingly, beneath her touch, and she walked into a room bathed by the lights of the city through wide windows.

The walls were dark mulberry, white accented above a polished wooden floor, and everywhere there were warm creams and browns: on the couch, on the chairs that surrounded it, on the bar which formed a flawless curve at one end of the room. Dual black pillars hugged the border between bedroom and living area, but the arch between was filled with a gigantic television screen, wafer thin and free standing and consuming what seemed to be half the floor space. There was a bed, neat and uniform, backed by bamboo in a contrast to its staid grey sheets – and on the bed, elegant and saturnine in the sharpest of black suits, was the very person she had been waiting all day to see. Blair felt her breath catch, and for a moment she disengaged to give herself a stern talking to. When she was focused upon the room once more, she realised that hers was not the only expression illuminated with pleasure.

"I dressed for dinner," she said, and turned slowly on the spot. He assessed her with a long look, a look that smarted.

"You're perfect."

"I'm confused: dress for dinner but don't eat, and come to a suite where there's no food." She arched an eyebrow. "Unless I am dinner, which I of course I have no objection to."

"Join me?"

Blair lowered herself gingerly down on the bed beside him, stretching out on her front and wriggling her toes in their black satin Caparros'. He was beside her, on his side, one elbow propped up and examining at her as one might examine in exhibit in a museum. There was a dreamlike quality to the moment which Blair was loathe to break, but being this close together and not even speaking was straying into waters where she had long forgotten how to swim.

"Are you okay?"

"I am now." He returned her gaze, her smile. "I wanted to ask you something."

"Which is?"

"What's your favourite movie?"

It was hardly the question she'd been expecting – perhaps something more along the lines of whose turn it was on top or whether she'd been to yoga – but she answered with a rehearsed snapback. "_How to Steal a Million_."

"_How to Steal a Million_? The Hepburn movie?"

"Yes."

"You're lying."

"I am not!"

"Your eyes are doing that thing where they don't match your mouth."

Blair bounced upright in indignation, folding into the lotus position and wrapping her arms around her torso. The effect was somewhat ruined, however, when she shivered as his fingers closed around her wrist. "If you're such an expert, what is my favourite movie?"

Charlie-not-Charlie brushed his thumb over the blueness of her veins, traced a line along a tendon and frowned almost imperceptibly as he thought. "You're not a thief at heart," he said, almost more to himself than to her. "You're a society girl, and the only way you're still one is because you steal. You don't believe in it, though."

"You don't believe in anything," she retorted.

He pressed down on her pulse and ignored her. "The air of ingenuousness, the sharp tongue...but then there's this underlying sense of decency and a desire to be accepted for what you are, not for who. Hmmm..." He ponderously turned her hand over, gently manipulating the knuckles so that her fingers played a brief chord on his palm. "_Breakfast at Tiffany_'_s_. It has to be."

She sniffed. "Every girl loves _Breakfast at Tiffany_'_s_."

"Not like you do."

A knock at the door destroyed the moment, and Blair focused on the burning flesh of her wrist, feeling the blood beating beneath her skin and reflecting. It was, of course, a coincidence that he had guessed her favourite film; _Tiffany_'_s_ was everyone's favourite Hepburn movie, no one would prefer some flick about an art forger and poor Audrey dressed in a dowdy housecoat. Real life was beginning to alarm her, however, first in regards to the relief she felt upon seeing Charlie (who was still in need of a name, as Charlie would never suit), and second because he seemed, with his impeccably tailored evening wear and his too clear jaw line, to be seeing straight through her.

She didn't even notice that he'd left the bed until he returned, bearing a tray with the oddest representation of dinner upon its spread: an ice bucket complete with the obligatory bottle of champagne, a sectored dish of strawberries, raspberries and lightly frosted blackcurrants and a pan of slightly smoking chocolate which looked almost black beneath the light.

"Dinner," he announced, rejoining her atop the grey coverlet in a more casual variation on her lotus.

"This isn't dinner. This is an accident waiting to happen." She laughed. "This is going to everywhere."

"Not if I'm very, very careful." He selected a strawberry, ripe and pointed like a tongue and removed the stalk with a swift twist, dipping it almost delicately in the chocolate so as not to spill even a drop. "You'll have to be the judge of whether these are fit for consumption." He raised it above her lips.

Blair tipped back her head to accept the fruit, but with a fumble of fingers it had dropped from his grasp and down the dark hollow between her breasts, leaving a smear across her exposed chest.

He smirked. "An accident."

"Of course."

"May I?"

"You may."

His tongue slid knowingly across her clavicle before following the streak downwards, tracing a line of heat across her skin. Blair breathed in sharply as he nipped a little at the swell of one breast, finally emerging triumphant with the strawberry between his teeth. It hung in the air between them, tauntingly, teasingly crimson, and her lips were stained darker still as she bit into one side and felt his mouth respond on the other. They crushed it between them, juice and seeds spraying down and out and staining like blood. He swept his thumb across her chin and she licked like a cat at his fingers, sucking away the last remnants of sweetness with a swirl of her tongue as he watched her through half-closed, black gold eyes.

She paddled her fingertips briefly in the chocolate, still almost too hot to handle, and streaked it across his lips. He attacked her fingers as she had his, and there was a jolt lower down than her navel that made the world throb. Her mouth was on his the moment he relented, tasting the bitterness of cocoa, so dark it made her draw in her cheeks. One of his hands knotted into her hair, both pushing and pulling her into the kiss, and by the time he pulled back she was gasping. Her hands fumbled blindly for the Krug as she looked into his eyes, could not seem to stop looking into his eyes and the bottle – now shaken up as she, Blair Waldorf was shaken up – exploded too early and showered them both in stinging droplets. She tugged down the sticky front of her dress as it continued to bubble over, thanked God and Serena's good sense for her lack of underwear and drenched her bare torso in what was, quite possibly, the very epitome and paradigm of every fluid ever drunk. Her throat was wet, her breasts were coated, and champagne trickled downwards and gilded her bare skin.

She knew not what she had awoken.

He knocked her backwards with the ferocity of his mouth all over, savouring every inch of damp skin and making her moan, pushing apart her legs so that he was inside her before she was even ready and she shrieked and then sighed, and he tasted of chocolate when he kissed her again.

Second-hand sweetness.

Charlie pressed his cheek to hers as they thrust together, pushing and pulsing against one another in a valiant attempt not to be the first one to break. Blair dug her nails into her palms and her teeth into her lip, not quite knowing why she wasn't supposed to but only that she shouldn't; perhaps because he'd known _Breakfast at Tiffany_'_s_ without asking, or perhaps because she wanted him so very, very badly that it made her sick with herself because she didn't know his name.

He knew she was struggling because he was too, but he had the upper on seduction with his fingers scoring lines on her hips and that dark, bittersweet voice coaxing her into yet another little death.

"You're mine," he murmured, and softly brushed back the tumbled hair from her temple. "But every time I see you, I still can't decide whether I want to kiss you or fuck you or tear you to shreds for just being there."

Blair shook her head violently, denouncing his right even as her muscles began to contract and draw all the light in the room with them. "No. No. No." Another gentle touch on her lips, another explosion of bitterness against her tongue: more chocolate. "You can't have me. You can't have all of me."

"It's not your choice."

"Why not?"

He rasped a laugh. "Don't you see? We're the same: inevitable, magnetic. Stop trying to fight it."

Each word rushed through her in a sudden shockwave, and she gave up. She gave up on battling against him, on denying the honesty in that smooth, utterly sincere, utterly depraved tone of voice. She gave up on the letters forming words forming sentences and instead focused on the motions of his body, at the point blank truths it was confiding to hers and which hers was whispering back. She took a deep breath and arched her spine, and even that tiny shift in alignment was enough and too much to shove her into freefall, twisting each sound and thought and layer of skin in ways she'd never known they could.

They shared that moment in complete and perfect silence and, when it broke, they were just two too knowledgeable children lying on top of each other in a hotel bed, each knowing all too well that the only thing they didn't understand was each other.

_**~#~**_

Chuck liked to watch November come – surely there was no man alive who didn't enjoy observing the fruits of his labours – but watching her fight off the inevitable climax was even more delicious. He didn't know why she did it, but the tense little motions of her slick body gave him some idea: she was beginning to feel it. 'It', of course, was indefinable, what he felt in her presence, something between butterflies and razor blades in his gut...and now she was beginning to feel it.

Her lashes fluttered, dark against her cheeks. "I should go."

"Why?"

"You got off, I got off; that's all that matters."

And so they relapsed, back to business like a train on a track.

"Stay," he ordered (or begged). "Just for a little while."

It wasn't in him to say 'please'.

The tableau they presented verged on comical, her in such a position of power while he was still on top. Chuck realised this disparity and rolled to one side, pulling her body into his and draping one arm over her desperately petite waist. She paused for a moment or two, and then her fingers interlaced with his.

"Why?" She asked.

"Because I'd like to fuck you again," he replied pragmatically. "And because it makes things easier. The real world doesn't exist, and that somehow makes sense."

"I'll stay –"

"Thank you."

"On one condition."

"Which is?"

"How old are you?"

He parted the curtain of hair concealing her neck and carefully massaged the nape, just in the place where it met scalp and where too hard a pinch could knock her out cold. She purred.

"I'm a few months younger than you."

"Charlie?"

"Yes?"

"I can't keep calling you Charlie. You're not a Charlie."

"Go to sleep, November."

"I don't want to spoon with a stranger," she said irritably.

"You're too late."

November made an odd soft sound of annoyance and kicked off her heels, and Chuck maintained his pressure on her skin and watched her fall asleep with a thick feeling in his chest. Only a short time ago, he had been accosting her at a gala, and now she was versed enough in his ways to know that they could take a brief respite – just forget, when they were together – and he wouldn't lay a finger on her.

She trusted him, and that either made her very, very stupid or far more perceptive than anyone he'd ever known.

His eyelids flickered shut.

* * *

**_There's a very blurred line between what Chuck wants and what Charlie wants right now, and the same applies to Blair and November; on one hand, there's the mind-boggling, food-related, dirty-talking sex. On the other, there's a bizarre connection between two people who don't even know each other's real names.  
Thanks and - hmmm, what do I promise you this time? Strawberries? Dipping chocolate? Krug instead of body wash? - to: _QueenBee10, Noirreigne, SaturnineSunshine, jwoo2525, MegamiTenchi, finnlover, Kensley-Jackson, ellibells, CBfanhere, READER120, notoutforawalk, anabella-chair, Poinsettia, Stella296, libertine84 _and _blair4eva._ You are all the best cheerleaders a girl could ask for and an endless source of inspiration and encouragement.  
_**


	8. Skin

**7. Skin**

He was tangled – completely tangled, lost in familiar sheets that were not quite familiar enough; not the Empire, then. There was another warm body in the bed beside him: pliant skin beneath his fingertips, the sharp ridges of her spine. The air was thick with sweat, sex and sugar, and Chuck cracked an eyelid as she turned, and then November's startled brown eyes were black in the early morning gloom, burning into his with an intensity which bordered on fear.

They both spoke at once.

"I should have –"

"No, it's my –"

"No, if I hadn't –"

"If I'd thought, I –"

He let his voice tail off to look at her, to watch the panic crossing her features, and then captured both of her slender wrists between his hands and held her still. "This doesn't change anything. We're still...we're still us. We're still whatever it is we are to each other."

"Are we?"

"The room isn't going to burst into flames just because we fell asleep."

Her face was touched with lines of stress between the brows, fingers moving restlessly over each other. "I asked you before where we drew lines, and this is the one nobody ever crosses. I am...you are..." She sighed. "To be completely crude, I'm your booty call, and you're mine. Sex is the end of the line for us, not waking up and smelling the roses after a night of _sleeping_ together."

"I slept on your floor."

"You got out before I got up."

"Stop being so dramatic."

November scowled at him, and Chuck knew that the worst was over. "I am not being dramatic! I am simply trying to keep my world and your world as separate spheres that do not touch. I don't want to have to avoid you because I talk in my sleep or you snore."

"Would you consider avoiding me over breakfast?"

That glare.

"Or coffee, at least."

"Coffee," she repeated. "And I hope you aren't going to walk around the hotel naked to get it."

"No," he replied. "But the way you're acting, room service will bring you out in a rash – not to mention that last night's outfit is torn and covered in champagne. I have to find clothes, coffee and a concierge, at least."

There was a moment's pause, and then she smiled slowly. The glow from the windows illuminated her face, the lines of makeup smudged beneath her eyes and the bare pink lips. Chuck found it horribly easy to hate her in that instant, to hate himself for trying at all. After all, their relationship was built on lines, and although they had lines, he kept crossing them; _she_ kept crossing them, or at least prompting him to do so. He had never been able to fathom what it was about November, what in a grainy photo had sucked him from his dark world into hers, to so many warranted and wasted climaxes over pictures, videos, the ring of high heels. Perhaps it was because of that glow, because she smiled so slowly as if she wanted him to experience every second of movement.

"Get out," she drawled, and then bit her lip as his eyes flamed and he held onto her bunched fists for a second or two longer before appropriating a nearby robe and leaving the room.

Blair smirked. She was sore, unpleasantly so, and wanted nothing more than a hot bath, first to wash the stickiness from her body and second to soothe her fractious muscles and wash the fatigue from her face. Dragging the sheets with her as a makeshift covering, she rose and wobbled towards the bathroom, admiring its cool modern contours as she pushed on the dark wood of the door. A huge mirror ate up the wall above the sink and, as she bent and stretched, the sheet slipped.

Flesh.

Fat.

Too fleshy, too flabby, layers of it crawling beneath her skin.

She knew it was impossible since only yesterday, but it seemed the straight slope of her waistline had undesirable curvature and that there was a new roundness beneath her breasts. How many calories had to be in all she'd bitten or tasted or licked the night before, the usurious amount in alcohol destroying all her plans?

Ugly.

Ungainly.

Flawed.

She could almost hear her mother's voice telling her so, telling her what a waste and what a disappointment she was. Real women had real willpower, real spines, and with them the power to win and succeed. Women who pushed themselves deserved everything the world had to offer.

They deserved love.

Suddenly Blair's hands were scrabbling, looking for anything on the bare gleaming surfaces that might assuage her guilt. She thought of disgusting things, things she had buried, the truth behind the lies when she had been branded for Nate, debased for her mother, had cheated and stolen and lied to get what she wanted at Constance and thereafter. She had lost Yale, lost the man of her dreams, ruined so many friendships; and then her family had left her when they at last knew her worth, and she was poor, and she was a filthy grasping thief who would rather wear a pretty dress to a pointless ball than stop the lights in her home from flickering. She was a slut, a slut who slept with a man she didn't know, a whore who would follow her libido wherever it would go, dropping everything for a sweaty little thump in the dark heat of a club.

She was kneeling before the white porcelain, its coolness beneath her cheek. Her tears ran hot.

Her fingers on her lips.

In her mouth.

Too far, and just far enough.

Blair gagged and pushed, gagged again and pushed again, forcing every thought, every feeling out of her body though her throat burned and her hand was scraped red across the knuckles. She was sick again and again, trying harder, trying to be better, trying to cleanse herself. So intent was she on self-purification that she didn't hear footsteps, didn't hear the murmur of her other name. She hear anything, didn't want to hear anything but the sweetness of oblivion until the door creaked behind her, and there was sudden silence.

Chuck heard it the moment he re-entered the room, and felt sorry for her. A night of debauchery didn't always end with half of it lost down the toilet, but sometimes too much was just too much. He called her name quietly, wondered if he should investigate, made the decision and silently pushed open the door.

The world was dyed red and black, and he thought he was going to kill her.

November shrieked as Chuck grabbed her bare ankles and dragged her backwards across the floor, irreverent of her pain or her safety as his nails dug into her skin. He dropped to the floor and pulled her to face him, gripping her shoulders until the surrounding flesh was suffused white and red and shaking her, shaking her far too hard and snarling things he himself didn't understand. She was sobbing, screaming, begging him to stop and he couldn't; he wanted to, but he couldn't. He thought he had made himself clear the night before, not letting her hold back because she was a part of him now, a creature of his own making. Her teeth chattered and rattled, and as much as he wished he could stop and dry her tears, she had damaged his obsession, his perfection, and the human part of her deserved to suffer for that. The girl in the pictures didn't shove her fingers down her throat, only laughed and glittered in the sunlight, and she was the real one because she was the one he knew.

After a little while, she bowed her head, and he couldn't go on anymore. She was still crying, still gasping and speaking in little incoherent shrieks, and he pulled her – all of her, bruised limbs and bile streaked mouth and tearstained eyes – into the front of his clean white shirt, effectively undoing any and all good that the concierge had done him. He rocked her like a baby, shushed her, stroked her hair and pressed his lips to her forehead. Her beauty, her horrible beauty was all that was fragile, and they had broken it.

"You don't understand," she said when she could speak without choking.

"I do," he told her fiercely. "I know exactly how you feel, because I wanted to do everything right – to do everything right so I could always be right – too."

"You don't know, my mother –"

"I do."

"You don't!" She raised her swollen face to his, rage black in her eyes. "You don't understand why, or how, or who. You know _nothing_ about me."

"No." She twisted like a cat in his grasp and he held her still, never letting up on the crushing pressure on her shoulders. "I know everything that you are. I know what you won't tell people and what you do, and I know that the public you – whatever fucked up Astor or van der Leyden or Pierpont you are – isn't the real thing. She isn't you. She isn't the one I want." He shook her again, more gently this time. "And you aren't hurting yourself with this. You're hurting me."

"This isn't about you."

"Do you care about me?" He demanded. "At all?"

Another few tears dripped silently down her cheeks by way of an answer.

"Then you won't do it."

"I can't –"

"Yes. Yes, you can."

"I've tried."

"You've tried to be perfect." Chuck smoothed back the hair from her brow and tried too, tried to pretend that he wasn't feeling like those razor blades in his stomach had slashed through and destroyed his insides. "You've never tried for me. I want you to try just for me."

"I –" Her voice cracked a little. "I thought you were going to kill me."

"I was."

And it hardly seemed that the rules mattered anymore, because there could have been blood gushing all over the tiled floor and it still would have been less of a massacre.

November's eyes were closed for a long time, and she seemed to be giving him time. Chuck put her in the clawfoot bathtub and filled it, torn between exhaustion and the buzz he usually associated with coke. He held her head higher with every rising inch of water, forced her to breathe and felt as if without him, she would drown. His phone rang several times, and he ignored it. When she opened her eyes, finally, she looked up at him with such weariness, such an endless lack of judgement. "I'm not going to try and drown myself, you know."

"Sit up."

She did. "You should get your phone." He rolled up his sleeves. "What are you doing?"

"Washing your hair."

"Why?"

"Because it has vomit in it."

"Real life is calling you – several times, in fact."

"I don't care."

It was an odd sort of baptism, the silent lathering of her hair, the intuitive way she lay back and moved and sometimes closed her eyes and sometimes kept them open, watching him erase the marks of her hands with his. There was a stealing peace in the room, its warm yellow light bathing her body through the water and showing him everything he hadn't seen, or rather had denied seeing: the too defined ribs, the ferocious hollow behind her hipbones, the gauntness below her collarbone. Chuck knew he was a fool, and more of one because he was meant to save her; he had sent her dresses and watched her walk to school, but he had never realised that loving something meant you were supposed to save it, savour every part of its being.

Love.

Did he love her?

The water rinsed clean, and November sighed.

_**~#~**_

The air was crisp as they stepped onto the sidewalk, the well dressed young man and his companion, a heavy wool coat draped around her slim shoulders. She shivered, and he just looked at her.

Blair smiled weakly. "My fault, right?"

A single shake of that dark head. "You were...misguided."

"I feel as if I owe you."

He turned up her collar, pulled the fabric in closer to her throat. "All you owe me now is not to run away." His voice had an edge of steel in it. "Because I would find you."

"Charlie," she whispered, though it wasn't his name.

"November."

"I understand now, I think: that what we have isn't just names, or sex." And it wasn't. He cared so very deeply for her that she had feared for her life in his presence, so terrified by so much anger over something which the rest of the grown-up world considered taboo if spoken of, but otherwise acceptable, rational. "And because we're something else, something..." Something which verged on fanaticism in the harsh beating of her heart. "I'd like you to kiss me," she said finally, the breeze whipping strands of damp curly hair around her face. "Here, now, where every cab driver and tourist going past can see us and not know that we're more than they'll ever know. We are." She found his hand, gripped it with her smaller one, felt the pulse through his fingers. "We are."

Charlie looked away from her, out into Madison Avenue, across the lanes of traffic, into the glittering haze of the city morning. Then he turned, and in a move so fast that she didn't even have time to be surprised, he had bent her backwards and put his mouth on hers. Blair closed her eyes to hold on to that kiss, to hold it to herself; it mattered. She was afraid of him and of herself, but still it mattered.

They mattered.

She just didn't know if that was enough.

* * *

_**Thanks to:**_** MegamiTenchi, CBfanhere, SaturnineSunshine, ellibells, QueenBee10, thegoodgossipgirl, Kensley-Jackson, jwoo2525, flipped, libertine84, Poinsettia, Nikki999, CBLove21, READER120, louboutinlove, canadiandonutsarethesexiest, Stella296 _and_ GashedWounds._ Last chapter was rather a light one, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on this one's return to darkness.  
_******


	9. Acid Alkaline

**8. Acid/Alkaline**

'_Charles, it's Lily. Look, I know you're upset about the actions of the board, but that's no reason to –_'

'_Charles, we understand you want to do this your way, but –_'

'_If you want in any way to stop your father's company falling by the wayside, you're going to call me back_.'

"Did you ever read that story about the lady and the tiger?"

The silk covering her eyes was slippery smooth, cool against her cheeks. "Yes. Why?"

"Which would you have chosen?"

"The tiger."

"You'd rather he die than be happy, then."

"I suppose if I really loved him I would want him to live, and be happy with or without me; but I don't think I could bear the thought of him and the lady, together when we couldn't be." She laughed. "I'd be damned either way, though, so what does it matter? The princess loses no matter which door she opens. What about you?"

"Tiger."

"And if it was me?"

The hardening of his voice beyond her blindfold. "Don't ask me that." Pressure across her bottom lip, the feeling of skin on skin. "I wouldn't want you to die," he murmured. "Maybe if you lived I could steal you back somehow."

"And if I fell in love?"

"You wouldn't."

"Why not?"

She could feel his mouth hovering above hers, the instinctual urge to move forwards or backwards or do anything but stay still. "Do you want to fall in love?" One kiss: soft, sweet, unnatural. "I'm pretty sure the last time you were in love was with the Vanderbilt who got you branded." Another: slower, dragging teeth across lips, willing her to follow. "My father told me it was just another way of twisting the knife, and for once I'm inclined to agree with him." The third: too long, drawing the air up from her lungs, the black tunnel of her vision blending with the black softness of his wool overcoat beneath her fingers as she reached up to chase a shiver down the nape of his neck.

"Have you never been in love?"

"Never."

"Sometimes it's alright," she whispered. "And sometimes...sometimes it hurts."

The elevator doors chimed and the tension broke like shattering crystal, something beautiful and biting lost forever.

Blair smiled ruefully. "Are you going to take this off now?"

"This being..."

"The blindfold."

"I can think of several other things I'd infinitely prefer to take off you – with my teeth, preferably." He sighed. "Turn around."

The blindfold slipped from her eyes, and Blair blinked in the brightness of a white and gold room with sunlight striping the dark wood floor. The air was still, unused and unblended; she breathed through a dream, through the opulence of panelled walls as she stepped between honey coloured pillars and ran her fingers gently across the white couch back. She turned back to see an odd look in his cat's eyes: a lightness playing against the black-gold. "What is this place?"

"This is an apartment on Park."

"Why are we here?"

He watched her evenly, assessing her face. "This is ours."

_This is ours._

_Ours_.

Blair felt her head snap back as if he'd hit her, and suddenly she was turning, looking all around her, scanning ever corner of the room for some sign of marring and imperfection. "Why?" She asked, and her voice was low and angry and no longer enamoured of pretty chairs and prettier pieces of artwork. "Why would you do this?"

But his temper rose as fast as hers, and where she spoke, he growled. "I'm sick of behaving like a child." The elegant angle of his jaw became pronounced, too sculpted, painful and turning his expression black. "I'm sick of the alleys and the hotel rooms, and the anonymity and the notes and your games –"

"My games? _My_ games?"

"You wanted rules!"

"You wanted me!" She glared at him, at his ridiculously perfect suit, at the full flame of rage she knew she was mirroring. "You're the one who started all this. You're the one who came looking for me, came after me, spent months following me around and treating me like –"

"Treating you like what?"

"Like you own me!"

That nerve; that particularly raw nerve, open and pulsing beneath the light. "Forgive me for thinking," he snarled. "That being the person who fucks you every night and stops you killing yourself in the morning gives me some rights over you, gives me the right to make a gesture that benefits us both!"

"I'm not your whore!"

"You may as well be!"

They both stopped dead, paused the pacing in tight little circles which had kept vitriol slamming through their bloodstreams and bolstering their hearts. Blair breathed hard, her skin on fire, heat rushing to her cheeks as she quivered, shook, rattled where she stood with rage. _He_ was the messed up one, the fucked up one, the one who followed the girl he saw in the picture. _He_ was the one with the penchant for mystery, for darkness, for being unseen when she didn't care if the entire world saw her – saw the other her, the girl who didn't survive the night and died when her body made sweet little deaths with another.

So she spoke in a measured tone, trailing her fingers across a line of glasses on a probably priceless sideboard. "So all of this is all mine?"

"Ours," he corrected, and she selected a tumbler.

"Mine," she replied, and let it fall to the floor and smash. He followed the movement without a flinch, without a sound, without anything but a look of slightly disdainful curiosity.

That irritated her.

"Don't –"

_Smash._

"You –"

_Smash._

"Look –"

_Smash._

"At –"

_Smash._

"Me –"

_Smash._

"Like –"

_Smash._

"That."

_Smash._

A sneer flickered around the corners of his mouth. "Are you about done?"

She smiled with half her mouth, with derision in her dark eyes. "Why? Can't you get the deposit back? And if you own me, by the way, shouldn't you be able to control my actions? Like: breathe, sit, sleep, eat, come because I like watching you? You're sick like that, if I recall."

"There's one glass left."

"So?"

"Break it."

"Excuse me?"

"Break it."

Blair's chest was rising and falling too fast and now the blood was pooling, roaring in her ears. She raised that one last veto high above her head and then let it fall, shards bouncing back like diamond dust to fall once more, littering the floor in legato trills of sound. The room was a battlefield of refracted rainbows, scorched earth, feelings – and there was only ever one way to settle a war.

He gripped her by the throat, hard enough for one quick gasp before he forced her lips apart and her hands were fisting helplessly in his hair, his coat, pulling hard, testing and pushing and seeing what it would take to make him yield, to make him blaze up at her like a firebrand. She had only ever had that little power, however, the power of her want against the greater power of his, and she used it now to break his lockjaw and stroke the roof of his mouth with her tongue, find his with hers, glory in the mess of biting and tangling and battle. She didn't mean to but she was pushing his coat from his shoulders, pounding at his chest like the last hurrah of life, scratching at concealed skin with her nails. She wanted buttons to pop, needed cloth to rip.

She _needed_ to damage him.

Pain; jarring pain as they staggered into the liquor cabinet, its glass frontage shattering and sending dull shockwaves radiating through her back. She didn't care as he tore the back of her dress, peeled the bodice from her arms and bit her hard on the breast: ecstasy, bruising and staining her skin purple. Retaliation was sweet as she manipulated her high heeled foot against his zipper, pressed gently and too hard, thrilled at the groan that resulted. He hooked her leg up around his waist and she followed with the other, and then there was agonising, empty grinding which made her burn all over and shake her head and ask silly, silly things of someone who clearly wasn't listening. She solved the messy art of extrication with eyes closed as she bit down on her lip, finding him and her and guiding them together.

She was raw.

Alive.

Blair let go of the remnants of somebody's dream cabinet and let him take her weight, let him be her counterweight as she led and rocked and forced him to follow. She set the pace, for once, slow and then fast, slow and then faster, faster until she couldn't keep up and she wasn't thinking but some other part of her was doing all the work and she couldn't stop if she tried. This was a bad way, this way her body could move without her bidding, a bad way she'd felt she could always move but never dared because she was Constance's darling and the perfect, perfect, perfect girl.

But he knew her.

The good and the bad.

Which was why she found herself back propped against a ruin with the mounting pressure of a hurricane threatening to tear her in two.

"Tell me your name," she begged.

And he – eyes on hers, mouth close enough to hers to bite or kiss or kill – simply said, "Chuck."

Her head hit glass and Blair nearly blacked out as the entire world convulsed, renewed and convulsed again. "Chuck," she whispered, eyes open and dreaming as she recaptured the line of his brow, his nose, the irreverent lips with one slightly trembling finger. "Chuck." The vestiges of orgasm shook her over, over, an earthquake instead of a hurricane. "Chuck," she repeated. "Chuck."

He pressed his lips so tenderly to her forehead, and there was peace in that little touch.

_**~#~**_

Chuck felt her; deep in the dark parts of himself, he felt her. He turned to his head to watch her watch him. "This isn't just meant to be somewhere to hide you, you know."

They had been hard pressed to find a part of the floor that wasn't covered in shattered glass or ruined clothing, and she was dead weight: lighter than air but still rippling, boneless and limp. Now they lay before the unlit fireplace together, legs coated in a mass of black wool and naked in every other way that mattered.

"I know."

"But there will always be food in the fridge, the concierge if you want anything, a car at your disposal." He swallowed. "I don't think it's this part of you that has the problem, that feels the need..." He couldn't say it, couldn't spew the ugly words into the victory of these moments. "I want you to always be able to come here when you feel like you need space – from the world, even from me."

Her eyes were glowing, serious. "If I could run," she said. "And start over, begin again...I think I would run with you."

Chuck looked up at the ceiling, away from November's seraphic silence. "I said you loved the Vanderbilt."

"Yes."

"You didn't say yes or no."

She propped herself up on her elbow, a tumble of curls dripping over each shoulder, marking her pale skin with their darkness. "I loved him. But it wasn't the desperate, horrible love which makes people drain their bank accounts and drop bombs and stand on tables for each other. There was music, and we were dancing, and we were happy until the music stopped and we realised we actually weren't happy all."

"Do you think you'll ever fall so hard again?"

He kept his eyes averted this time, only saw the curve of her shoulder or rosy, still bared nipple just out of the corner of his eye. Finally, she said, "I think I'll wait for you to fall in love first, so you're not alone. You deserve that, you don't deserve to be alone. Nobody does." Her hair, ghosting across his chest as she kissed his shoulder, curled into the hollow of his throat and went eye to eye with his pulse. "Whatever your father may have said to the contrary."

It didn't help – it wouldn't help the starving, blinded little boy he had always been, would always be – but Chuck could feel his heart swelling in his chest.

_**~#~**_

Lily van der Woodsen was unduly elegant, and she always would be – as much as she would always be Lily van der Woodsen, no matter how many times she changed her name, took up with media magnates or unwashed hipsters and made them her new frontier. Sitting beside him at the long glass table, Chuck could only see her profile, and her mouth was working up at the edge as if it were being stitched.

"While the party was a success, several guests expressed their surprise that you weren't present –"

"I'm not interested in extorting money from cougars after my trade secrets, Lily."

"And it wouldn't hurt the brand for you to –"

"Have dinner with some women I never wish to lay eyes on again?"

"Charles." Lily laid her pen down on the tabletop with a definite click. "Whoever she is and however good she is at what she does for you, she isn't worth losing your father's company over."

"Excuse me?"

"I can't contact you. You're never to be found at the Empire. No one knows where you are. It can only be because you're working out your stress with some new bareback rider or trapeze artist or ambassador's daughter." She removed her reading glasses, folding them neatly together with the appropriate amount of disappointment and pity in her sigh. "I know you're young, and I know you feel a disposable woman is the solution to all your problems right now –"

"The woman I'm _seeing_," Chuck said slowly, pushing each word out through his clenched teeth. "Is certainly not disposable."

"Please, Charles."

"Please, _Lily_," he ground back. "Trust me when I say that this...is important."

Her eyes narrowed. "Can I meet her?"

"No. Surprisingly enough, you can't." The metal chair frame shot sparks through his hand as Chuck dragged it back across the floor, standing and looking down on the too graceful woman he suspected his father had once loved. "Because I'd rather have her understand _me_ than whatever it is you think of me. I'd rather keep her untainted by the board, and the company, and you and your groupies in the Colony Club; you might want to focus on why the hell my father's company is being torn apart from the inside rather than with whom and how I spend my time." His spine was stiff, indignant, electrified; he left. The office fell silent, and the portrait of his father on one wall glared. Chuck felt the overwhelming urge to tear it down and into shreds.

Lily watched him go, watched that perfectly tailored back retreat with the barest flicker of emotion. She thought back over the other voice when he had finally picked up the phone that morning, the pause before he left for her and obscured the speaker to say goodbye.

'_Real life_?'

'_Real life._'

'_I'm glad you picked up this time._'

'_I'm not._'

'_Shhh._'

The slight sounds of breathing, the delicate quiet of a kiss resonating through the phone and making her feel intrusive, unwanted.

'_Time to face the tigers._'

Lily van der Woodsen wondered what kind of a woman it took to hush Chuck Bass and to understand his tigers.

* * *

_**If you've never read 'The Lady, or the Tiger?', just Google it and you'll probably find you already know the story.  
You have no idea how glad I am to be able to stop saying Charlie! However much it irritated you guys to read, believe me: writing it over and over was killing me! Thanks to:**_** Stella296, 88Mary88, QueenBee10, Kensley-Jackson, MegamiTenchi _(a special thank you to you,__ cherie, for being a saving grace for my hormonal self!)_, jwoo2525, SaturnineSunshine, Missy06, flipped, noutoutforawalk, ellibells, blair4eva, thegoodgossipgirl, Krazy4Spike, CBfanhere, queen'scat, libertine84, CBLove21, Poinsettia, Noirreigne _and_ READER120._ Oldies, newies, I love and venerate you all.__  
Now, you know what to do..._**


	10. Dog Days

**9. Dog Days**

The next time she took, she was by his side. They parted on the pavement after a night on the floor – she thought he dragged her to bed at about three am, but couldn't quite be sure – and Blair slipped her hand into a passing pocket and retrieved cash, cold and hard. She peeled off a twenty, pressed it into his surprised palm. "My deposit," she told him, and he laughed as her cab drew away. Settling back into the seat, she was only just satisfied with the hygiene of her surroundings but content enough not to care. She was happy – how long had it been since she could say she was happy? – and little parts of her insides were floating. There was a name for the feeling, she knew, but Blair also knew she wasn't ready or sure enough to use it.

Yet.

Chuck was walking a tightrope, and he knew it. He had never before had to mix business with pleasure because pleasure was an inevitable consequence of being in business; this was different. The desire to be with her, to be understood without the judgement and past experience that afflicted the sight of even the most charitable onlooker was going to eat him alive, and the fact that it consumed his desire to make money and preserve his father's legacy was almost laughable. Bart Bass, cold Bart Bass, had raised his son in the darkness and in that way reared a boy in the skin of an animal but _she_ asked him to be better, silently and without need. She didn't have to ask because he wanted to be better for her, wanted them to be better:

Together.

The twenty crackled between his fingers, and without thinking Chuck tucked it into his breast pocket, behind the pocket square which matched today's tie. His heart beat dully against it.

Happiness was a strange emotion, much like the other (the one he wouldn't think of).

It was better to wait, and to count.

He waited for his own ride and contemplated the fact that he could possibly be feeling a mass-produced, carbon-copied, greeting card emotion for a complete stranger – for a girl with no name.

But then, when had Chuck Bass ever been orthodox?

There was mist in the streets as they drove through them, fog smacking against the windows like a silent grey pauper. He stared at it, felt chilled. That was what it boiled down to, in the end: Chuck Bass had never been orthodox. Even if he ever could persuade her to give up her name, to whisper in his ear her true identity and purpose, would it be enough? He didn't know if he had fallen for the face, the body, the mind, the soul, and how much those weighed in comparison to a whole woman. He didn't know how to be somebody's _something_, how to be the kind of person who could bring her champagne and ask her to dance as if it were a privilege rather than his right.

Still, he smiled, because November was November. Who cared what lay beneath? Nevertheless, he had woken mixed up in her still, and now they were a mess of watercolours as the thought of her, her name, his heartfelt _maybes_ drove him to Bass Industries and to the brink of (possible) insanity.

The boardroom was full, but there seemed to be a pretty even split between those who were there because they believed in him and those who had come because they didn't. Surprisingly, Lily took the seat on Chuck's right as he sat down, and he shot her a rare genuine smile. She looked momentarily stunned before returning it, laying one pale hand briefly over his before bringing both to rest on the stack of documents before her.

"So," asked Chuck of his shareholders. "Why are we here?"

"Because the Bass name is losing clout."

"Because the brand is being devalued."

"Because our input is necessitated."

"No, no and required, not necessitated." Bart Bass' son sat in Bart Bass' chair, and although the two were as unalike as day and night, there was still something of the father in the play of that cruel mouth. "We're here because you didn't trust me when I told you it was risky going into Asia. We're here because you lost faith, lost credibility...and in doing so, you lost my trust. You seem to forget that I have the controlling interest in this company, and therefore the only way you can _possibly_ mutiny is by going behind my back so my stake doesn't come into play. My father built Bass Industries from nothing; I intend to follow in his footsteps with the same approach. _Nothing_." His fist hit the table, hard, and coffee slopped into several laps. "Nothing around here happens without my input anymore."

"Really, Mr Bass?" At the other end of the table, Frank Archer steepled his fingers. "And where are we to find you, if we need you? You've spent more time AWOL in the last month than your father did his entire life."

"I have a brand name to protect," Chuck replied coolly. "People don't go to the Empire or the Palace for the maid service or the grilled cheese with truffle oil – they go to live like Chuck Bass. I, therefore, work under the radar so that the public sees what it's supposed to see of me. If there's something I'm keeping under wraps to enhance the ideals of our brand, then I'll be out of here, keeping it under wraps."

"And what exactly are you hiding?"

"Now, that would be telling."

"Charles," Lily interjected smoothly. "Has been working personally with several clients in order to oversee the rebranding of the Empire."

"And the purchase of a Park Avenue apartment, what is that in aid of?"

Chuck's face at once became blank, hard, flat and without expression. "Where I live and what I spend my capital on is none of your business."

"For the sake of the brand," Archer returned, removing his glasses to polish them on his sleeve. "I think it's important that if people go to the Empire Hotel to live like Chuck Bass, they actually see Chuck Bass living there."

"I'm afraid I missed out on the part of this conversation where you became advisor on my personal life, Mr Archer."

The man subsided, and Chuck rapped his knuckles rebelliously upon the tabletop. "I think the company is happy where it is for the moment, at least until anything profitable comes on the market. Asia was a mistake, not one of mine, but a mistake nonetheless. I have, however, decided to keep our hotel in Thailand open."

"Because?" A woman Chuck had never seen before blinked across the table at him, her eyes made up too thickly to be anything but a marketing rep.

"I like the country," he replied defiantly, and smiled Bart's shark smile.

_**~#~**_

"I'm sorry?"

Blair was cold, and cold radiated from her head to her Burberry encased feet. She shivered where she sat, in the visitor's chair before the bursar's desk, and the coldness froze her expression in place and made every word an effort. The bursar saw her discomfort, but she showed neither pleasure nor pity – well, perhaps a little pleasure that another pretty young thing so unlike herself was beginning the descent downward without mother or father or trust fund to catch them.

"I'm informing you," she repeated. "Of the fee increase, since you choose to handle your financial matters directly rather than through an accountant."

"How much?"

The woman named a figure that would be nothing to Eleanor, nothing to Serena's mother Lily; Blair bit the inside of her cheek and focused on that nagging, invisible pain to keep her from panicking.

"Thank you," she said aloud. "I'll have it seen to."

She walked the streets alone, too numb and too busy thinking, thinking, thinking to hail a cab. Her situation had, of course, been hopeless for months, but petty – to her mind, at least – crime had kept her afloat. It was true that the lights at her mother's penthouse on Fifth Avenue were more often off than on, that she sent Dorota home to Queens earlier and earlier each day, that she had taken to bathing like the French in hotel bathrooms from time to time; she had never before, however, been laid so low, and at her own hands.

The ridiculous thing was that there were thousands, perhaps millions of dollars sitting in a bank account with her name on it, accruing interest, ready to be spent or squandered. But her mother – the mother she had been avoiding because she now seemed like poison when Blair was trying so hard to heal – did not deserve the satisfaction of knowing that she had a dependent, that she had been financially forgiven for her divorce and her new husband and her abandonment. Society had looked the other way when Eleanor and Harold, former and respective Waldorfs had taken up with new lovers and headed for pastures nouveaux, but Blair would never forget; they had cared for her for almost twenty years, and then left with never an apology, never a thought directed towards the person they had brought into being.

Maybe it was selfish to be so angry.

She didn't care.

But now she was ruined.

The street ended abruptly at a crosswalk, and Blair was surprised. She was still cold, but she suddenly knew where she was going. At least the Upper East Side was known to her, and anyway most of the world would be able to find Park Avenue blindfolded.

The doorman smiled at her, and she tried to smile back. "Floor fourteen," he said, with amused recognition at the girl who had been guided past him blindfolded. "Nice to see it occupied."

"Yes."

He held open the door and she slipped inside, glad somewhere in her mind that he had reminded her where she was going. There was an ocean between now and this morning, an age between this night and the last. Even if she could no longer survive in this beautiful place, in the school she'd fought so hard to be accepted in, in the glossy world where she had grown into a woman without a future, at least she could go to a place where things became easier because she had no name, no past that was recognised.

Someone had cleared the shattered glass from the floor, and the air smelled of flowers.

She wondered at the smoothly waxed dining table, polished to a mirror finish, at the glass-fronted bookshelves. A square vase of blown white roses (the kind with a scent) occupied one windowsill, and as Blair ran her finger beneath one bloom, a petal fell onto the equally immaculate white wood. She felt guilty.

It took a little time for her to enter the bedroom, afraid of what she might find. Could she face saying goodbye, she asked herself, with her head held high and her heart – more important, less essential – intact? She didn't yet know where she would or could or should go, but Serena would know. Serena would want to help though she couldn't, but she'd still have that old friend in Brooklyn, somebody's somebody who would take Blair at face value as everyone did and accept her for someone else's sake.

Everyone but him.

The doors of the walk-in closet presented a fresh mystery, and Blair pressed her palm flat against the panelling as she pulled down the handle.

_**~#~**_

He rode the elevator in silence with a smile on his face, and it was not a smile many had seen. Chuck Bass – _the_ Chuck Bass – was happy, happy for once and satisfied with his works. The board would bend when they realised the draw he provided for the brand, the gravitation of New York society towards deviance. Outwardly, of course, he remained deviant in every sense of the world; still, he had not looked twice at the over made up marketing rep and didn't care for her insincere congratulations. His feelings were still shifting, but actually caring and wanting to care was one that, albeit it new, he did recognise.

November was looking out of the window with her hand curled around the heavy head of a rose, lit from the street by the flat white light of day. He closed the space between them and gently inhaled the scent of her hair, enjoyed the small sigh which indicated she'd been waiting for who knew how long and still trusting he would come. His fingers splayed across her waist, held them in situ.

"Good day?" She asked.

"Better now," he replied, nostalgic. "How was yours?"

"Columbia upped their fees." She gazed straight ahead of her, blinked and spoke in an oddly blank voice. "It's only to be expected with the current economic climate."

"So?"

"Stealing isn't going to get me through this. I have to go." She turned in his arms and felt smaller, suddenly, thinner, a wisp of a dream he had once had that was now disappearing. She smiled half a smile. "I'm drowning on dry land because I won't be what my parents expect me to be, what the school thinks I am. I have to go."

"You're not going," he said fiercely, holding on to her hard as if it might forestall her. "You can't."

"I don't have a choice."

"You do."

"No, I don't."

"I'm your choice."

She looked up at him with her wide doe eyes, all naivete and pure innocence tainted by the black. "I went into the bedroom today," she told him slowly, as if disclosing some great secret. "And the closet was full with every shirt, every dress, every pair of shoes I've ever admired or even set eyes on. That adds up to thousands and thousands – maybe more. I can't and I won't take any more from you."

"But if I –"

"No, Chuck."

Even caught between the devil and the deep brown sea of her eyes, he felt a white hot dart of something inexplicable as she said his name. It made him sick, horribly so, to think that the unknown feeling might be taken away. "If not..." He felt the shadows of ribs beneath his fingers and was still afraid. "If not, then I want you to be here. I don't want you going anywhere."

"In the apartment you bought, where you pay for everything? Isn't that worse?" A curtain of dark hair fell forward as she shook her head. "I'd feel like a prostitute."

"Don't say that."

"What are we, then?" She demanded. "You tell me. You buy me pretty things and keep me alive, basically, and I have sex with you. We aren't any different from a man with a credit card and a girl on a street corner."

"That's not true, and you know it!"

"You haven't answered my question: what are we?"

"I don't know." Chuck raised one hand as he considered an action, rethought it, rescinded the thought. "I don't know, but what I do know is that it stopped being about the sex from almost the very first day." He took her chin in his hand, raised her face, kept his eyes on hers so she didn't look away. "For now, we're something without a name. We have something no one else has, and for a little while longer we both need to lie and tell ourselves that it's just about the sex because we're scared. You've seen an out, and now you're running away because you _feel_ for me – I know you do."

"It's about the money, not how I feel!"

"So rent out your apartment. Sell your old clothes. Try."

"I'm afraid," she admitted. "You stopped me purging and it broke something between us, didn't it? We're too close to each other now to come out the other end when one of us does actually fall in love."

"Oh, we'll be broken," Chuck returned casually. "In pieces, possibly all over the floor. It'll be bloodier than anything you've ever seen."

"Because we..._feel_ for each other?"

The way she said it was so tenuous, so halfway to the door that he kissed her quickly to see if she would follow him down. It took a moment – during which time she asked him, silently, what it meant to feel, and he couldn't reply – for her to lay her lips against his in an answer, an answer that couldn't be spoken but which they could both share, deep down in their stomachs where the butterflies swirled in ever more desperate circles. He kissed her mouth and her throat and her bare white shoulder, and she pushed down the strap of her dress and closed her eyes and laced her fingers behind his neck.

"Try now," she whispered. "Help me to try."

* * *

_**A lot of you seem very interested about what will happen when Chuck and Blair's worlds collide, but can you hold on just a little longer? There are things which need to said and done before then, other problems to be solved; Blair's fighting her demons, but we haven't even uncovered Chuck's yet. There's a reason Bart's legacy is doing so well...  
And on that cliffhanger-ish note, it's time to express some uber, major and also mega gratitude. Thanks to:**_** notoutforawalk, Skatious, Kensley-Jackson, blair4eva, MegamiTenchi, jwoo2525, Stella296, flipped, SaturnineSunshine, thegoodgossipgirl, ggloverxx19, Krazy4Spike, Iluvenis, CBfanhere, ellibells, READER120, Nikki999, libertine84, anabella-chair, Poinsettia, present. tense, ****CBLove21, jamieerin, CBBW3words8letters _and_ queen'scat.****_ Regulars and newcomers, you are all far too lovely and deserve Chucks of your very own.  
Now, you know what to do..._  
**


	11. Bring The Rain

**10. Bring The Rain**

Blair dragged her fingertips over her cigarette burn in the pale light of morning and watched the rain slamming into the windows. New York seemed to be ferocious in everything it did, even the weather; each heavy droplet banged against the glass like a thrown stone. The scar over her coccyx stung sometimes, though she blamed herself for the pain which accompanied thoughts of Maureen and the First Wives' Club. That was the past, and this grey dawn was her future. The other side of the bed was cold, empty, but she knew better than to worry that Chuck had strayed. Silently, Blair pulled the covers up to her chin and basked in the quiet glow of _feelings_.

Such as they were.

She heard the cascade of water within the apartment and sat up, reaching for yesterday's clothes (conveniently enough draped over the lamp, the nightstand and the headboard respectively). The protocol for weekends was still unclear, as was the protocol for sleepovers – she didn't need to go to class and it could be assumed that he didn't need to go wherever it was he went when he wasn't with her, to whatever it was that paid for this penthouse – so she climbed awkwardly into her panties and bra and dress and Manolo pumps and raked her fingers through her hair, making a mental note to invest in more hardwearing underwear.

The high heels of her shoes made no sound on the carpet as Blair tottered unsteadily towards the bathroom, her muscles aching pleasantly as they too woke up to support her. The white door swung open at a nudge from her hip and, as she raised her eyes, she bit her lip on a small gasp and thanked the Lord for transparent shower cubicles.

She had never seen Chuck fully naked, and the visage was undoubtedly an enjoyable one. He was not thickly muscled or tanned like Nate, not lanky and apologetic for himself like Cameron (one of her very few other sexual conquests). There was lean musculature beneath his skin, however, definition to his shoulders and arms. The push and pull of tendons would have been interesting to a student of anatomy, but it was nothing short of alluring to Blair. One finger slowly rose to brush her bottom lip, and then she was biting down on the tip and touching it lightly with her tongue. She watched him lazily, leaning against the doorframe with one foot hooked behind the other and an easy, warm feeling trickling down in an arrow from her navel as she waited for him to notice her.

He didn't seem at all worried by her voyeurism when he observed it, only looked back at her through the glass with the same lethargic pleasure and expectation which made that sliding warmth just a little warmer. She felt herself flush hot as one fingertip slipped across the cloudy glass, inscribing a question mark: a request, and an invitation.

She pulled her dress over her head, let it drip from her fingers to the tiled floor. She removed her bra and felt the dozen tiny stings of confined flesh released to the humid air, even after so short a time. She wriggled out of her panties and draped them neatly over the door handle, where they swayed gently like a flag of surrender. Chuck watched, and she wanted him to watch; wanted to peel back the layers of her skin and show him every last everything. Finally, she shucked her shoes and crossed the short distance to the stall – which was more than big enough for two, or three, or even ten – pressing her palm to the now dripping question mark as she passed.

"Your virginity," he said as she stepped in beside him, hair immediately plastered flat to her head by the spray. "Why did you give it up?"

She considered, back pressed to the glass with her damp skin moulding to its coolness. "I was sixteen, and I think I was trying to prove that I was old enough to do it, old enough to be a woman." Blair remembered the fumbling motions of Nate's hands, his sincere smile. It had been poignant, but definitely awkward. "At the time I thought it was perfection, but now that I think back on it, all I can remember is him kissing my cheek a lot when I told him it was hurting. He couldn't look me in the eye for a week afterward." She turned her head from contemplation of the dripping wall to Chuck, wetter and somehow that much more vulnerable than she. "What about you?"

"Sixth grade, bad girl. She knew exactly what she was doing, and I was a model pupil." He smirked.

"That's it?"

"You want more?"

"More than the Cliff Notes version, yes!"

"Her name was Georgina, and we did it in a pool."

"A _pool_?" Blair choked on an unsolicited mouthful of water. "You lost your virginity to someone named Georgina in a _pool_? Do you know how many venereal – not to mention non-specific – pathogens can be transmitted by fluid of _any_ description?"

Chuck winced. "Please do not ruin this cherished memory for me."

"Were you her first?"

"No. The interesting part, though, was that she liked both boys and girls, which meant I learned how to please her and please myself at the same time. Everybody wins."

Blair pushed back the damp hair from her forehead, pushed with her muscles against the tightness between her legs as water ran in rivulets along the molten curves of her skin. She pressed forward, moving her body closer to his. The spray beat down on her back. "So you lost yours in a pool," she summarised. "To a talented bisexual with no respect for the rate of infection."

"And you lost yours to someone with no idea what he was doing or where he was going."

"He was sweet."

"She wasn't."

The bad girl and the good, golden boy seemed to hang in the air between them as she dropped her eyes down, let them rise languorously back upwards. "Turn up the heat?" She asked, in a very different tone of voice to before and with no hint of a question at the end. She saw Chuck swallow and his hand moved on the temperature gauge, inching it from yellow to orange to red. The heat became unbearable, and fresh clouds of steam hissed all around them. Both began to sweat.

"What have you never done?" He inquired of her, eyes locked with hers as if the breaking of that connection might be the end of everything. "Have you broken every taboo? Ignored every edict?"

"I've never..." Her voice trailed away, water down the drain.

"What?"

"Don't make me say it."

"And if I want you to say it?"

Blair rolled her eyes, but extended her tongue and tapped it lightly against her top lip. "That."

"No one has ever done that to you? Not even your first?"

"Why would he?"

Now it was Chuck's turn to roll his eyes. "Because he would know, if he were any kind of a gentleman or even any kind of a playboy, that pre-penetrative stimulation – also known as foreplay, something sadly lacking in most sexual encounters nowadays – can help lessen the pain for a woman; it would have hurt less for you if he'd even bothered to consider it. Did you, for him?"

"Yes."

"Well..." His expression had shifted, and she breathed in and bit her lip at the way he was looking at her, which hardly needed further elaboration. "I'm duty bound to redress that balance."

"You wouldn't."

"What are you so afraid of?"

"I'm not afraid of anything! I'm just not interested."

"You are."

"Am not!"

"Are so." He chuckled, just a little too much darkness tingeing the sound. "You're wondering, right now, what it would feel like." She shivered as his palm curved around her elbow. "You can see it in your head." The other hand was at her throat, slowly traversing the delicate skin. "You're imagining what it would be like for you, for me, wondering what I would expect in return, telling yourself it's wrong – and that just makes you want it so much more. You're trying to push the thought out of your head completely and to forget about what I'm offering you, but it just keeps crawling back in."

"I...you...never..."

Blair stumbled over the words as Chuck bent his head to hers, inch by inch, letting her grow taut as she waited in a strange mixture of arousal and trepidation. Her lips fluttered beneath his as they touched, sharing water droplets and breath in a tiny kiss, a too small kiss which spoke so quietly that she could not hear the words it said. Both of his hands moved to smoothly stroke back her hair, to tilt back her head so she had to hang on to him, wet arms brushing over back and torso, electrifying every hair to stand on end. She pulled him into deeper exploration with her teeth, and he surprised her by dropping a little lower and transferring the caress to her chin.

"Is that bad?"

"What are you doing?"

"Shhh." He moved down further, letting his nose glide along the ridge of her throat and his tongue become acquainted with the hollow beneath. "How about that? Are you dying yet?"

"Of course not, I –"

She made a rough little noise as his lips passed over her breasts, shifting back and forth with feather light touches which heated her skin hotter than the burning water. One hand curled unconsciously into his hair.

"Bad?"

"No."

The smooth plane of her stomach, the neat well of her navel. "Are you disgusted with me?"

"I find you morally disgusting," she replied, and he grinned into her hipbone; she felt it. "And if you go any further, I'll scream."

"I'd like that."

"Chuck..."

"November," he growled, and it was against the most sacred part of her. "Perhaps you would be so kind as to hook your leg over my shoulder."

"No!"

"I thought you weren't afraid?" Chuck looked up at her with both iris and pupil shaded black and sinister by her shadow, challenging.

"I'm not."

"Then leg, please."

Her eyelids flickered shut as she came to full realisation of what she was doing, and Blair lifted her leg and draped it inelegantly over his shoulder. She felt rather like a lamb bound for the most bizarre kind of slaughterhouse, undone by the most basic of fears: she was sure that _down there _she looked nothing like the one of the nineteen-year-old-silicone-pumped-well-lit-spray-tanned _artistes_ who plied their trade on the after dark channels and, like most women, she had never seen herself fully in a mirror. What if something looked as it shouldn't, or what if her relative naivete meant that something wouldn't react as it was supposed to?

Her doubts were assuaged, however, by the slow and courteous kiss he pressed there, chaste on any other body part but that.

A pulse began to beat where there had been no pulse before, and her heart returned the rhythm.

"Oh. _Oh_."

"There?"

"Yes – no, oh..."

"Where?"

"Mmmm..."

"There?"

"Yes, yes, _yes yes yes_..."

Blair felt out of her body, as if she were floating above her own head, light-headed from the steam and the heat and the ecstatic dizziness which was pounding through her veins and taking control of every breath, every motion, every thought. She was dimly aware that she was pulling too hard on Chuck's hair, cognisant of the fact that she was writhing and gasping and saying things which made no sense and which seemed to amuse him greatly. Her back arched against the cold glass, providing welcome reprieve from the hotter than hellfire spray, and she whimpered several times in quick succession. Her muscles began to tense very, very slowly, locking into place in succession from her head to her toes.

There was a moment of complete stillness.

The glass wall shook as Blair curved back and hit it, hard, her entire body juddering as she clenched and relaxed, did so again, riding out a wave of euphoria that was still somehow softer, simpler, lacking what she had when she shared those precious moments with another person. "Chuck," she breathed, and it was all she needed to say.

She pulled him up as much as he stood and the kisses were breathless, heated, starving, tumbling over into newness and gratitude. He turned her with a too swift movement which made her head spin and made her smile, and then they were melting together like candle wax, reforming, shaped like two but sharing oxygen, intentions, emotions: life. Blair sighed and sighed again, over and over, waiting for another edge that would surely come for them both and cure the want and – briefly, at least – cure the aching that was all separation had to offer.

"Look at us," he murmured.

And she did look, through the steam and glass and chrome, across the room to the ornate mirror. Their reflections were silver streaked, but still recognisable; glittering, erotic, soaking limbs intertwined, the spark of pleasure bright on her face with each new movement, tension rife and evident in his neck and shoulders. She bent on command as he made her lips part, raging red and swollen, too dark and too ready, as dark as her glossy, too satisfied eyes.

"Connected," she whispered, and her whole body throbbed over again as each word resonated. "We look connected."

"We _are_ connected," he replied, and she recognised the truth of it.

She was in too deep, hands above her head.

Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.

And all the loneliness was being suffocated out of her.

Terrifying.

Electrifying.

Uplifting.

Blair watched his face in the reflective glass, and wondered how she'd come to love him without even realising it.

_**~#~**_

Chuck pulled her back to bed afterwards, made her lie still so he could examine every inch of her again and then fall towards sleep, sated. Her nose was touching his as she drowsed, such an innocent sensation that he was surprised at the satisfaction he gained from it. But then, she was _his_ November, all his, his protégée in how to be gratified by Chuck Bass alone. He had never understood how people could lust after relationships – the mess and hassle of dinner dates, anniversaries, engagement rings – but perhaps if it were this simple, this significant without the hanging on each other's arms and need for labels...perhaps if everyone embraced the less moral sides of themselves, they would be much happier for it.

"Chuck..." Her voice was a thread of sound, just on the brink of sleep.

"Yes?"

"Why don't you want to know my name?"

She was curled up like a cat, and her knees bumped softly against his torso as he said, "Because I have _you_ – the you I know, the angel drawn to the dark side."

"What does that make you, a devil redeemed?"

Oblivion was calling him too, blissful and black with her arms tight around his waist. "Redeemed," he repeated, and framed her legs with his so that they lay in chaos, a wonderfully hushed chaos. He seemed to be trying to prove it to himself, repeating it once out loud and thereafter in his head. "I am a devil redeemed." _Am I_? _Am I everything my father thought I would be_? _Am I everything he thought I wasn_'_t_? _Am I capable of redemption_? _Am I capable of change_? The words chased each other, but for the moment they did not consume him. Instead he lay still, breathing in her scent and ignoring the consequences of every new thought. He wasn't going to let them drown him, drag him down; he believed that what she said was true, so for a little while he believed in himself.

Because he loved her.

* * *

**_So Chuck is in love with November - or is it that he's in love with Blair? 'What's in a name?' will soon be the question on everyone's lips.__ Thanks to:_ SaturnineSunshine, Chairfan4ever, GoodGirl793, MegamiTenchi, mcdreamylover, QueenBee10, notoutforawalk, Krazy4Spike, CBfanhere, Stella296, Iluvenis, ellibells, thegoodgossipgirl, CBLove21, jjackieperez1, lesliexhale, Poinsettia _and_ anabella-chair._ May you all have the chance to fall in love post bizarre confessions in a shower about virgins, pools and never having done _that_.  
Now, you know what to do..._**


	12. What Would You Do If I Tore You In Two

**_This chapter contains domestic abuse and brief mentions of drug use.  
_**

**

* * *

**

**11. What Would You Do If I Tore You In Two**

"But I want to..."

"No, November." Chuck pulled the sheet in closer around them, kissed the down-turned slope of her mouth. She resisted him for a moment, and then her eyes closed with a little sigh and she curled her fingers beneath his jaw. They broke for air and she was still too close, her eyes filling his horizon. Her eyelashes swept downward, fronds of black lace, sweeping his cheek.

"Why not? You did it for me."

"That was different. You're not a whore." He pushed back the hair that was falling in damp curls around her face, let his fingers tangle in the whole dark dramatic sweep that flooded her back. He had said before that she may as well be his whore, but even in such a short space of time, things were different: one of them had fallen in love, just as she'd predicted, and the great Chuck Bass had no idea how to be in love. Nothing ought to be prohibited, cut back on just because his feelings had changed, but he couldn't quite see her the same. He was both on edge and peaceful in her presence, and he wondered if she could feel it.

"Don't you like it?" She teased, arching her back as he stroked her spine and wriggling against him like a cat.

"I do."

"But you leave it to the whores."

"Yes."

He should have seen it coming, noticed the snap in her expression that accompanied the question.

"So you still see whores, then."

Ready.

"And what if I do?"

Aim.

"Then...nothing."

Fire.

November drew the duvet closer around her, forming a barrier between them as she untangled her limbs from his and rose from the bed like a naked seraph. Chuck appreciated the artistry that made up her now healing body as the sheet slipped, but grabbed hold of a corner when she made for the door and he realised she was in earnest. "Come back to bed, jealous."

"I will not."

"Why?"

"This is why you don't want to know my name!" Her face was shut to him. "You've probably got an apartment like this in every building along Park, complete with girls called January or June and stupid sob stories like mine!"

"That's not true, and you know it!"

The sheet preserving her modesty had become a battleground between them, him pulling and her pulling back, forcing out something deeper through the conduit of Egyptian cotton and an obscenely high thread count. She was angry, and he was angrier still; but she was the one inching closer. "Do I?" She asked, a flush suffusing her cheeks that was not pretty or part of an afterglow. The fight drained out of her as the blush drained away, leaving her pale. "Do I?" She repeated. "I thought that I could do this, be just another brick in the wall to you, but I...I _feel_. I do." Her eyes met his, velvet soft in their gentle acceptance of light, space, everything he'd offered. "You chose me, and still I don't know why."

"Do you want to know?"

"Yes."

She let herself be reeled in then, let him extract her still too lithe form from between the muffling layers and bind them together again. November propped her elbows on Chuck's chest and let her hair veil her face, and this time he made no move to push it back.

"You were – you are – fearless," he told her. "Or at least the girl in the picture was. I have no idea what you were doing, but you were smiling at the camera as if you owned whoever was taking the picture. You smiled like it was important we all remembered your name, but your eyes...you hated the person who was taking the picture, and the world, and me because I didn't have permission to want you." No permission meant that he bought files of pictures of her, gathered pages of surveillance, paid endless bribes to get to watch her every move. "You were like me." He chuckled darkly. "I suppose I knew I could never fix myself, so I decided to fix you instead. I would never wish it on anyone to be as miserable as I am."

"Am?"

"Was," he replied quietly, a little coldly. "And don't push your luck."

"Don't push yours," she retorted quietly. "Because, like it or not, I chose you too. You're just going to have to deal with that."

_**~#~**_

"Mr Bass."

"Mr Bass."

"Mr Bass."

The office was halfway to silent, nearly empty but filled with ghosts. No one said a word as Chuck passed them by, only the bold calling out his name in lieu of a greeting. He wondered what he'd missed, what shadow had passed over the sun in his absence (unless it was that he himself were the eclipse). Everywhere there seemed to be black, solemnity, and the boardroom was quiet and still. Lily was reading the day's minutes, and she looked up in surprise as he entered, still riding his wave of solitude, still between peace and the ground shaking beneath his feet. Her still lovely face looked worn. "Charles. I didn't expect to see you here today."

He almost asked her why, and then another board member stepped in. "Yes, today of all days –"

"Especially in his place of business –"

"In the place that bears the Bass name –"

"Charles," Lily repeated.

Chuck's hand clenched on the doorframe.

"Charles."

"_A failure, a disappointment of an heir..._"

"Chuck?"

"_Get him out of my sight_."

It had been a full year since that voice had sent him to Hell, and then departed itself.

He might as well have been five again, ten or fifteen. He was as much use now as he had been then, spending the morning and the night before and he couldn't remember how many nights before softening, slipping, sliding down into an oblivion that his father had often reminded him wasn't real. He had committed the most repugnant of sins, drowned in the feeling of a good fuck, lost himself in a body and decided he cared for the mind. This was where he should have been, what he should have been doing, where he should have been building and breaking and building up once again instead of playing doctor to some girl's insecurities. The pressure mounted in his fingers as his grip became too tight, and the pain made him gasp.

"_I_'_m your everything_."

"No, you're not," he snarled, and then addressed the curious board members. "I want everything on the Asia investments you have, and I want it now."

"Charles..."

"You are not my mother, Lily, and my father is dead." He couldn't look at her, couldn't see the shining serenity of her face past a haze of his own black. The father was dead, and the son was a weakling, spending his life fucking a coward and calling it love, believing with all his head in _omnia vincit amor_ because if love could conquer all then love could save him, save him from the waste of life he had become, the fool he was born to be. "Pull down the shades," he ordered. "The light's giving me a migraine."

Chuck took his father's seat in the darkness of his childhood, and his heart lay cold and dead and scarcely beat at all.

_**~#~**_

"You look happy," Serena accused her.

"That's because I am."

_**~#~**_

"_Try now. Help me to try._"

"Shut up!"

His tumbler shattered against the white wall.

_**~#~**_

She took it from the closet because it was black, and no one did black like Dior.

She needed things to be special.

_**~#~**_

Chuck was shuffling through stacks of paper over and over, figures blurring as he heard the door open. The sheaf whirred faster along his thumb, along the lines of the multiple paper cuts he'd sustained over the course of the day, each smarting all the more because he could not forgive himself for them. She came in smelling of street, warmth, perfume; he hated it all. He swilled scotch with his lips close together, tried to drown out her scent with another, stronger one he wished was more intoxicating. Her heels clicked rhythmically across the floorboards, and she dropped her coat before she spoke.

"You're upset."

"Observant." His lip curled with the one word, and he looked out the window and cursed the city which had raised him.

"What's wrong?"

"It's not something you would understand, _November_."

She heard the insult, but rose above it like the well-bred dainty doll she used to be. "That doesn't mean I can't help."

"It does."

"Chuck."

"What?"

"We were so close this morning," she said. "And now you're miles away from me."

"Well, I do apologise that you can't have my attention every waking moment of the day. Unlike you, however, I actually do something with my life when I'm not busy fucking the people who pay my way in the world."

She didn't even have the grace to be affronted – or had too much of it. "I can't help you if you won't tell me what's wrong."

"I don't want your help."

"Yes, you do." Her footfalls were without the ring of stilettos, and he could imagine her face – compassionate, impassioned – as she stood in her bare feet and watched his back, glowing in that sickening way she did when she was trying to find another way into his heart. "You're scared and you're angry, and you're taking that out on me."

"Stop telling me what I feel."

She was behind him, the air filled with her.

He could taste her breath.

And her arms, so horribly sure, wrapped around him as if she were trying to hold him together.

But she couldn't.

No one could.

Chuck was living the life his father had set out for him, empty and lonely and cold and high up, banished to the highest point in the city where he could look down like a king upon commoners and make judgements. Her slender arms around him burned his skin, bound him to the spot, made him subject to her desires, forced him away from everything he had ever known. He couldn't relax against her, couldn't want her, couldn't need her to rock him to sleep like the creature who had cried when it was blinded by the light. She made him half a man, a twisted interpretation of a Bass, and he was hardly even thinking that she was a woman in her own right when he recoiled from the embrace, throwing out his arms and pushing air and body with it.

He expected her to stagger.

He expected her to leave.

Instead, she fell as he turned, stumbling back over the coffee table and landing on her back. Her eyes were closed for a brief moment, but when they opened they were steady. He longed for tears – tears that could be petted and soothed away – but she did not oblige. One hand braced on the couch arm, she pulled herself up, and he could see all too clearly that the movement hurt her. He stretched out a hand.

"No."

"Please –"

"No." She shook her head.

"I'm sorry –"

"You're sorry because that kind of hurt bruises." Her gaze was too calm, cold and clear. "You're not sorry for not feeling, and that's something I can't change." She gathered up her coat from the floor, unconsciously wincing as she flexed her wrist.

"Where are you going?"

"Not home. Nowhere you can find me."

"Stay."

His voice was a rasp, but it still had the ring of command, and November had slipped out the door before Chuck even had time to apologise for it. He set his sights on the bottle, the glass, and soon a renewed surfeit of liquor was burning through his veins like a penitent firestorm. He saw the red gleam as he slouched on the couch, on the sharp corner of the table he'd pushed her over: blood. He was the kind of man who hurt women, who made them bleed; that man was even less deserving than Bart Bass' son. That morning, the battleground of a coverlet and a name had never seen further away as he staggered in search of more single malt, poured packets of white powder onto the table with shaking hands and wished to God he could inhale her along with it.

_**~#~**_

"It's just a scalp wound," the doctor announced with cheerful aplomb. "They tend to gush. You won't even need stitches, it's such a small thing."

"Thank you, Doctor." Serena's teeth were gritted, and she held Blair's hand in a vicelike grip. She hadn't let go of her since Blair had arrived at the van der Woodsen apartment with her eyes blank and her words negative, and Serena had spotted the matted darkness in her hair. She had shrieked and rushed her to Mount Sinai and, now the doctor had confirmed that Blair was not going to die, she could safely drag her out into the corridor to wait while her health insurance was checked out and hiss at her beneath her breath.

"How did it happen?"

"It was an accident."

"And how many people were involved in this accident, Blair? Was it just you, or was it you and the mystery guy you've been seeing whose name you won't tell me, who you know hardly anything about and who has now started _beating_ on you!"

"It was an accident!"

"Tell me," Serena demanded. "Tell me."

Blair sighed. Her head ached, and she smoothed back the hair from her temples with her one free hand and pulled Serena over to one of the – admittedly disgusting – plastic benches which ran up and down the hall. She looked at her black silk lap, at the dress she had chosen in so much innocence and which had been crushed by so much spite. She knew he hadn't been trying to hurt her, only to harm whatever had been hounding him and making him push her away, and she had just been caught in the crossfire. Still, she smarted, and she shook her head to clear it before even trying to begin to explain.

"He's at least a Wall Streeter," she said. "Maybe more, because I know he has more money than either you or I have ever had. Neither of us were looking for a relationship, and we both wanted each other. It made sense just to try, to set a schedule where we'd meet and...you know. I asked questions, he asked questions. He's charming when he wants to be. He's sweet when he wants to be. We argue and he's mean to make me mean, and I feel like I'm in another world when we're together. He's sick, sometimes, as sick as I can be. I thought he was going to kill me when he found me purging, and he scared me out of it. He told me I was hurting him, and I...I can't hurt him."

"Even though he just hurt you?"

"He didn't mean to."

"You're making excuses, B and it's because you're a masochist. You've always been a masochist, with Nate, with your mother, with school...and now with this piece of work, whatever his name may be."

Blair tried for a smile, though it felt odd mixed with the tears now rolling ponderously down her cheeks, pearly beneath the fluorescents. "Only a masochist could love such a narcissist. Only a narcissist could love such a masochist back."

"You love him?" Serena breathed. She seemed divided between awe and disgust.

"He's tearing himself apart," Blair admitted. "And he can try and shrug me off all he wants, but the truth is that that piece of work needs me." She laughed a little, shakily. "Someone was so hard on him once that it made him hate himself, and I make him not hate himself like he makes me not hate myself. We're perfect when we're together." She closed her eyes as Serena's hands brushed her cheeks, catching fresh tears as they fell. "We're perfect together," she whispered. "And it's always so good until one of us starts fighting it."

"What do you want to do?"

"I don't know." She pressed her face into Serena's warm, leather clad shoulder. "I don't know."

_**~#~**_

"_Nowhere you can find me_."

"Come back," he murmured to her phantom, hovering just beyond his fingertips. "Come back."

_**~#~**_

Who knew why she had returned, why she hadn't just curled up with Serena on her huge bed and watched Audrey, eaten chocolate, cried. She would have done so if this had been a breakup – only it wasn't. She was bound now, bound to fight his tigers, bound to go back and face the one person she thought she understood for the same reason she understood herself: they were both broken, like the glass she stepped over, both empty like the bottles scattered across the floor. They were bodies, corpses, ready for the world's autopsy alone but Chuck and Blair together, though Chuck didn't know Blair and Blair only thought she knew Chuck. She wanted to trust that he wouldn't hurt her again, but she couldn't.

She just had to believe.

"You came back," he whispered, from somewhere near the region of her feet.

He was lying where she had lain, and suddenly her legs wouldn't hold her up anymore. Blair sank to her knees as the prone figure scraped halfway upright, swaying towards her in the darkness, his fingers moving over her face with an almost intangible touch as he checked for wounds, checked for life, checked for breath coming fast from between her parted lips as he got closer and closer to the now clean cut just edging onto her hairline. When he found it, he groaned, a sound with a hoarse kind of sob behind it and pushed his face into her neck.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry..."

"It's okay," she found herself saying, even though it wasn't.

"Can't hurt you, never you, everyone else, not you..."

"Hush."

"Does it hurt?"

"A little."

"Hate me," he murmured. "Please hate me for it."

Blair looked straight ahead, her eyes already spilling over as she gazed into the black and saw nothing, no raft she could catch hold of. "I can't."

"You can."

"I can't."

"Why?"

"Because –"

"Don't say it." He pressed his lips to her throat over and over, and she felt what could have been tears. "I don't deserve it, don't say it, don't make me better."

"I will stand by you," she breathed, and her lips were quivering. "Through anything." He was pushing her backward in a way that was too familiar, and the kisses on her neck were too hot. "Chuck..."

"I need to show you," he told her. "I need to show you."

"What?"

"What you are. What you mean. Why I will spend the rest of my life making up for ever hurting you."

Blair wanted what she shouldn't want, because she was crying for real and his skin on her skin was blue hot and he was passing words from his mouth to hers and asking to be made better even as he begged her not to love him. She hated that she wanted, that she craved, that she needed to be connected through flesh in flesh to feel like she was fixing him as he had fixed her. She still pushed aside her clothes, however, and she wasn't ready and it stung because of that, and she was surprised when he just wrapped his arms around her and kissed the soft crescent inner curve of her elbow with a slowness, a tenderness. There was no movement other than that, no sudden shock, no nothing. They were linked in mortal sin, but he had yet to turn the page and ask her to follow his lead.

"The only time," Chuck said quietly. "The only time I feel alive is with you, like this. Otherwise, I'm a dead man. I'm a dead man walking. And I can't let go of you, no matter how I try."

"So stop trying."

"I'm worried that if we spend all this time together, just us, then you'll see."

"See what?"

"Me."

"I see you," she told him. "I see you. I believe in you, Chuck."

"You do?"

"I do."

The room reeked of plastic, alcohol, perfume, sweat, and they lay together in the wreckage, their Ground Zero, the start of something new which might tear them apart again but as least it was purer, cleaner, without taint. They had become each other's life support, oxygen, and Blair knew she couldn't let go either. She couldn't let go of the little boy on top of her, even as he slipped into sleep, because the way she loved him was fierce and jealous and shook her to her core. One day, she knew, it wouldn't be enough. She'd want more than the life of a mistress, want more than to be the anonymous, fearless November – until then, however, they could build sandcastles. They could play and swing, and be the children they hadn't ever been.

His eyes were closed, but she knew their colour was richer, deeper, blacker than hazel.

She saw him, and he was heavy in her arms.

* * *

**_I knew this chapter was going to be controversial when I decided to write it. Blair may seem like a fool, Chuck may seem like a monster, and I may seem completely heartless for letting them have sex afterward - but hey, you knew this fic was going to be dark. Without the darkness of Chuck's fall, you couldn't see the light of Blair as his saviour. He had to break her in order to break himself, because she's the only thing in the world that matters more to Chuck Bass than Chuck Bass - and she came back because she can see straight through him and still love the beauty hidden behind all that beast.  
Thanks to:_ blair4eva, QueenBee10, ellibells, MegamiTenchi, CBfanhere, teddy bear, READER120, fswickar, D, Stella296 _(the wonderful co-author of our opening scene)_, SaturnineSunshine, CBLove21, notoutforawalk, Rosss, thegoodgossipgirl, mlharper _and_ GoodGirl793,_ not forgetting all my lovely and glamorous readers as a whole. If we shadows have offended, rest assured that, as Chuck quoted, '_omnia vincit amor'_: love conquers all._**


	13. Redux

**12. Redux**

His hair was beginning to catch on his collar and his jaw was rough, but it didn't matter to Chuck. He'd presented her with the box – large, white, bland – the moment she'd opened her eyes and blinked at him, not moving closer but not pulling away either. Now he watched as she smoothed the dress over her hips and avoided his eyes in the mirror, focusing on rearranging the pleats in the sumptuous fabric until they hung just so. She looked perfect, as always; but then, perfection had never been their problem.

"It's beautiful."

"But not enough."

"Not enough?"

She tracked his movements, and her gaze darted everywhere but his face, methodically taking in his rumpled hair and the anachronistic old movie tux, snowy white shirt, crisp black jacket and the classic white tie. The offering was velvet soft beneath his palms, equally soft against her shoulder when he brushed it and she didn't flinch. Her eyes widened as he lifted the lid, flared with awe and a little touch of horror.

"It's the Erickson Beamon necklace...no, I couldn't."

"Yes, you can."

Because he was already clasping it around her neck, already taking the time to shift each platinum lily into sparkling place. The pendant was a flawless diamond heart, a little too heavy, pulling the circlet slightly out of true. Chuck ran his fingers over it, surprised when hers settled over his and they both clung, unspeaking, to the unbeating heart above and to the right of her own.

"You don't have to do this," she said.

"What?"

"You apologised to me, and I came back. I don't need anything else."

"But I do." His voice was low, rough, so insistent that she tightened her grip as if to restrain him. "I hurt you, but you haven't let me hurt for doing it. I need you to see me trying."

"With thirty five thousand dollars of diamonds?"

"No." She shivered as he traced a line across her clavicle, up and over the ridge of her shoulder. Their eyes met for the first time, as if it were indeed the first time, and the glow of hers was unparalleled by any number of stones. "By the fact that I have made it my business to have this particular design discontinued, and every one like it recalled due to a supposed product fault. It is now priceless – and so are you."

"But why the dress?" The moment broke as November tilted her head to one side, pressing her cheek against his coarse jaw line. "Why the diamonds? Why the tux, for that matter?" Her skin rasped a little across his, and she seemed to enjoy the moment. "You're turning wild," she whispered.

"Don't," he returned. "Don't tempt me." Then, stronger, clearer, "I heard you last night."

Nonchalance sat oddly on her features, blended as it was with petulance and fear. "What does it matter? You said you wanted to be hurt, and you said that that hurts you, not me. Maybe I was hurting you."

"No, no." He rocked her gently from side to side, subconsciously soothing her with an undertone of steel. "You were hurting yourself, and that matters. It won't happen again."

She closed her eyes, still swaying, ignoring the snap behind his words. "You should know by now that you can't dictate to me."

"I can ask."

"So ask."

Chuck wondered if he would always struggle so to bend to her will when it was so easy to say sorry, to make amends, to be forgiven by her in any and all he did. She didn't know him, of course, and perhaps that made things easier. It was also possible, however, that anonymity made them more difficult. Every beauty they found had to be fought over, but she was his beauty – that was how things were, how they had begun not so long but a lifetime ago, how they would be forever if he had his way. Did she really need to have hers?

"I'm trying," he repeated, this time more sombrely. "To be good enough to let you go if I need to."

"I won't go. You know I won't go."

It was as if she hadn't spoken; he pushed on regardless. "And I can't ever let you go if you're doubting yourself, if you're doubting...everything."

"I'm _your_ everything," she returned, an echo of their second time.

"You are."

"Say it."

"Say what?"

"Say it back."

"That I'm your everything? Why?"

"Because I want you to know." November opened her eyes to regard him with equanimity. "I want you to know that you are, and to give up on the idea that I'm just sitting pretty in a cage and one day, you're going to let me out and I'll fly free." Her fingertips darted across the surface of the mirror, swift and silent. "You can open the cage door, and I'll stay exactly where I am. You can carry me out on your arm and throw me as high as you like, but I'll come back down to you again."

He chuckled, deep in his throat. "And do you sing?"

"Like an angel," she said mockingly, and then turned her head and kissed him before he had time to draw breath for a retort. It was a punch in the stomach that pushed the air from his lungs, a sudden lungful after asphyxiation. He didn't know how it was possible for her mouth to mean both of those things, but he needed the taste as well as not to draw her any deeper. He laughed again when she tried to part her lips and move against him, turned her face back to the mirror.

"Are you ready to be released?"

"Why?"

"Because the dress and the tux are because you and I are going out tonight. We're going to meet again: hit refresh, do it over, be civilised so I can make amends."

She made a small humming sound of approval and idly kissed his jaw. "Yes. After you've shaved."

She was happy, so he was happy in the oddly parasitic way he often was around her. Chuck knew that she had skinned him and still didn't know everything just as he didn't know all her secrets; he was torn between the deep dark something of _feelings_ and _love_ and the simple contentment of all being back to the way it was supposed to be. He was searching for something by way of this reworking of their relationship, a relationship of layers which was never meant to be a relationship, sharks hidden beneath the clear blue water, their tigers roaming in the night when she harmed herself or he pushed her away.

He questioned whether the harsh beating of his heart was like that – something dangerous, something which wrecked – or whether it was something which could survive in the daylight, where she could dwell and dance if only he were man enough to fix her.

_**~#~**_

Blair's skin was on fire, the fear of being discovered and the excitement of being nameless before everyone she knew irrational, unbelievable. There was little chance that they would survive this evening unscathed, and she didn't care; her stomach still bubbled with fear and they were still standing at the edge of every precipice possible, but now she was giddy with the risk. November had eaten Blair Waldorf alive the second she had been unleashed unto the real world, and now she pressed eager kisses against Chuck's face as they turned corner after corner and he refused her tongue.

"Yes..."

"No."

"Please."

"No."

She was out of control, because she had decided. She couldn't wait any longer. She couldn't hold her ribs closed, not when her heart was singing to be free. _I love you_ – Blair tested the words in her head. They exhilarated her and terrified her and just about tore her in two, but she had courage. It was strange that his fall had made her valiant, but now they were both debased, ground to the same level, flawed and painted black in the same measure. That was all her experiment had been in the bathroom the night before, of course: an experiment. They were so wonderful when they fell, after all, and there'd been no compulsion to lay her cheek against the cool tiles, no reasoning other than her own.

That was true.

What reason did she have to lie?

It _was_ true.

"I'll break your back," she whispered as they glided to a smooth halt and she snapped playfully at his bottom lip. "One day, I will."

He looked at her curiously. "What's gotten into you?"

_I love you_.

"Nothing," she supplied breezily and exited the limo ahead of him, clocking five minutes before he would make his entrance. They would never succeed if they arrived together, Miss Blair Waldorf and the ambiguous Chuck/Charlie/Charles. The deep blue of her dress swept the sidewalk as she headed up the red carpet into the hotel's plush interior, rebelling against form by pausing to tip a wink at a photog and receive several delighted flash bulbs in return. If she were asked, she knew there was only one thing she would be able to say.

_I'm going to tell him I love him_.

Of course she didn't feel faint.

Blair sashayed across the ballroom and felt bathed by its cruel glitter. She wasn't afraid, for once, of the eyes of those who had spurned her; New York always came to realise that the semblance of money was almost as good as the real thing in the end. Tonight she was as much their princess as she had ever been, and her diamonds shimmered. She waltzed into the bathroom, turned the lock, felt her phone vibrate as it had been doing at least five times an hour since she'd returned to the apartment. It was from Serena – _R U OK__?_ – and destined to join the host of other irritating _call me bck__!_ and _where R U__?_ messages her friend had also sent, well meant as they were.

_I'm fine_, she replied. _He's fine. We're fine. Tonight's the night._

_4 wat__?_

_ILY._

Her cheeks were flushed, fiery, bright with colour and her eyes gleamed, overripe and coal black. She bit her lip, and it bloomed full red. Her phone buzzed once more, this time longer as the caller waited to be answered. Sighing, Blair extracted it from her purse and ran a finger beneath the cool perfection of the necklace at her throat as she picked up.

"Serena, I already told you –"

"Blair?"

November crashed and burned, like the dream of depravity she was. Every inch of bare skin iced over, and Blair's bitten lip blazed.

"Hello, Mother."

"Why haven't I been able to reach you at home, darling? All I could get my hands on was one of those horrible automated messages telling me that the party I wanted was inaccessible! Why in the world would you disconnect that number when you know I need it to touch base with my New York clients?"

Harold Waldorf had run off with a gay model, and no self-respecting society matron would call on Eleanor again. But perhaps...perhaps this was an opportunity for Blair. Though her stomach had automatically began to heave in apprehension of what was to come from the tinny speaker, in fear of the mounting numbers on the scales he had removed from her sight, in recognition of every meal she had eaten instead of pushing around her plate and artfully rearranging, Eleanor was still her mother, not a monster. She deserved at least some part in her daughter's happiness.

"I haven't been living at the apartment," she said carefully.

"Then where on earth have you been?"

"There's...someone." Each word was selected with precision, and each hit the silent air like a bullet. "He asked me to live with him. We're in a penthouse on Park." No _I love him_ would justify the desires of the daughter over the mother, so she had to rely on the fiscal. Blair unconsciously began to pull at the quick of her neatly manicured thumbnail, ignoring the way it smarted as she waited, listening to the quiet sound of Eleanor's inscrutable breathing.

"And this...this _person_...the two of you are in a relationship?"

"Yes."

"But how in the world did that come about, darling?"

"I'm sorry?" The skin ruptured. A bead of blood blossomed, scarlet against inflamed cerise skin.

"You haven't told me what you weigh, so I assume you haven't been trying. If you haven't been trying, you've become lazy. If you're lazy, you are good for nothing as a clothes horse, and I always told you that men flatter women who are flattered by their clothes. Are you sure he finds you desirable?" Venom laced her tone, and though the intimate question made Blair blush, it was the ache below her breastbone which hurt the most. Still Eleanor continued to speak, and blood began to trickle down Blair's thumb. "Imagine what he feels, darling, what he sees. Indelicacy, a lack of elegance, a lack of determination...and no one could care for a creature like that, don't you agree? Now, there's the most delicious vintage Chanel I found for you yesterday, and all I ask is ninety pounds. That's _all_, darling. I just want you to be happy, to know that this boy isn't trading in on your feelings for him to avoid having to fight for you."

He _had_ fought for her.

He had fought for November, the girl he fucked.

Blair swallowed.

"Goodbye, Mother," she said firmly, and then she let the phone fall from her grasp with her mother still squawking indecipherably and crushed it beneath the heel of her satin evening pump.

There was a knock on the door, and Blair could hardly bear to open it. She knew his hair would be rakishly tousled, and it would hurt to look at him and love him now. Tonight was not the night. Tonight was hardly even a night to keep her head up and believe. He had fought for her, and he always would – the fact remained, however, that her mother had pushed her buttons with no apparent motive other than to inflict pain. Blair couldn't even begin to fathom the complexities of a mother who would envy her own daughter for being loved by her father, for being half her father, for being imperfect from the first.

He knew – what didn't he know? – the moment she opened in the door with her body curved over and masking her midsection, for all it was flat.

"What's wrong with you?"

"Nothing," she repeated, so that her sick little fantasy had come full circle.

"I see. Tell me."

She shook her head, letting the obligatory curls which had made her pretty just minutes before slide forwards and hide her, shield her. "It's a real problem, not a November problem – but don't worry, she's fine."

He bent to force his way into her eye line, her face, drew back when she flinched. "I don't give a damn what she feels. I need to know you're alright, that you –"

"My mother," she whispered, cutting across him when the words just wouldn't stay in any longer. "My mother called."

Chuck's face was impassive, and Blair hoped it would stay that way. She couldn't bear another emotional beating for believing what she had always been told, for not believing in him and only him. His fall would be nothing to hers if he did so, because God knew she would purge until she bled like her fingers were bleeding and they would tell lies at her funeral about how she was perfect and gifted and _happy_ and how no one could have wanted for more out of life.

But instead he reached out, because he felt her. She knew he felt her, because she felt him sometimes, beating in her blood.

Her head rested lightly on the expensive woolen shoulder of his jacket, and it smelt of cologne and scotch because it was his tux, his for real, not a rented one, and his hand held her there as if she might break her word and fly away from him. That was him, fighting; this was them, trying.

"It's safe in the cage."

"Yes – no one can hurt me there but you." She raised her head a little despite his grip, twisted to look him in the eyes. "You did hurt me. It did hurt."

And those eyes, much to her surprise, closed in relief. "Will you hate me a little?" He murmured, wrapping his free arm around her waist so that they eclipsed the light of the doorway with their embrace.

"Always."

"Good."

"Good?"

It wasn't laughter, but something like it passed over the crown of her head. "I'll always hate you a little too."

They exited in silence, without ceremony, going their separate ways, finding their separate paths through the crowd as if they had before each other. Only inside the sleek comfort of the limo did she let herself be lulled enough to take hold of his hand, though she looked out of the window and felt him looking at her. Their doorman smiled and said nothing. The elevator ride was silent.

She knew something was wrong when the bed was suddenly there and he stilled her hands on her zipper.

"Don't you want to..."

"No." Blair grew a little taller as he took her hand once again and raised it to his lips. He didn't kiss because he was who he was – whoever that might be – but turned it over to breathe warmth across her palm and shoot tremors through her. "No," Chuck reiterated, as he did brush his lips over the cut in her finger and the stinging skin. Then he pulled her down onto the bed, ball gown and all, heels and all, hurt and all, and held her as if she were a butterfly beating her wings against his arms that he did not wish to crush.

"I just want this," he told her when her breathing had calmed, shushing her as if he were soothing her through an illness and not the surprising mingling of heartache and lust.

"This?"

"I just want to lie here, with you."

She couldn't tell him even then, so she waited until he was asleep, still holding her as tightly as a favoured toy. "I love you," she breathed, and then pressed her forehead just above his heart so she could drown comfortably in the place she loved best.

* * *

_**Some people took umbrage last chapter at Chuck's refusal to have Blair perform oral sex on him although he let 'whores' do so. I'm sorry for not being clear on that: I do not, nor have I ever thought that the giving or receiving of oral sex makes a person a whore. What Chuck (and what I) was trying to communicate by refusing was that he wanted to give to Blair without the expectation of receiving, just as he had received without the expectation of giving with prostitutes. I'm sorry to anyone who was offended.  
Thanks to: **_**QueenBee10, GoodGirl793, blair4eva, ellibells, jwoo2525,**** LovelyAmanda, Kensley-Jackson, fswickar, ggloverxx19, gen, wrighthangal, Maudie, MegamiTenchi, Krazy4Spike, SaturnineSunshine, mlharper, louboutinlove, Iluvenis, Tiff xoxo, Whatevergirl1985, CBfanhere, cj-the-greatest, Noirreigne, Rosss, Poinsettia, libertine84, Stella296, CBLove21, s.i.c, notoutforawalk, thegoodgossipgirl, G, A friend, lesliexhale, READER120, jamieerin, BellaB2010, annablake _(welcome back to the Valkyrie fold!)_, L _and_ Nikki999, _plus_**_** special thanks to **_**signaturescarf_ for all the Tumblr love._**_** You guys bring out the best in me.  
**_


	14. They All Fall Down

**13. They All Fall Down**

_His eyes found hers, hot and black and full of furious desperation. She felt as though the world should stop spinning, as if the earth should shake – and yet all that happened was that cruelly painted mouth kept on moving, lips parting and then slamming together again like the doors of a prison._

_**~#~**_

**Twelve Hours Earlier**

Blair hurried across campus beneath a sky that was greyer than ash. The first few droplets of rain had just began to fall as she slipped past the doorman, shaking her head at his offer of an umbrella. Even the familiarity of a rancid yellow New York cab didn't feel safe today; her thoughts were shaking her, and the sooner she could hand her hastily written essay over to Professor Forrester and find Serena, the better. The halls were silent as she traversed them, her heels ringing out her heartbeat on the tiled floor.

She only found his office through careful scrutiny of a line of identical doors, each with their own brass plaque. 'Colin Forrester' was taped neatly over the name of his predecessor, and Blair rapped smartly on the wood beneath it.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

She pressed down on the door handle and stepped inside.

Her gaze slid from side to side, taking in the obligatory stuffed bookcases, distasteful modern art, the slight smell of age and dignity which clung to the room still. There was a lighter scent in the air, too, cleaner – his cologne? – mingling with something deeper, something sweet. Blair's eyes alighted upon the desk and she gasped, clamping one hand over her mouth as if to force the sound back in. The papers in her arms shifted as she moved, pitching to the floor in a profusion of precise references and swiftly constructed allusions.

She dropped to gather them up and found Serena's fingers moving with hers, gathering black and white words without a sound and stacking them into a neat pile. Blair too continued in silence, trying to work faster, but it was Serena who finished first – as she ever had – Serena who checked to make sure the pages were in order before handing them back, still shying away from eye contact as though she expected a slap.

"Miss Waldorf, I..." The admittedly highly attractive faculty member passed a hand over his hair as Blair stood, looking ill at ease in his immaculately fitted jacket and crisp shirt.

"It's alright, Colin." Serena's tone belied her face, oil over troubled waters. "Blair's my friend."

"Still, I feel –"

Blair smiled brightly, falsely, held up her hands. "I saw nothing, I know nothing, and I am no longer cognisant of anything having taken place. Now, Professor Forrester, would you mind if I borrowed S – Serena – for a moment or two?"

"Of course." His eyes were a little too brown, but sincere enough to suit. "Of course."

The door swung shut behind them as both girls tumbled out into the hallway, Serena's hair leaving a golden trail like a pennant in the air. Blair's fingers were tight around her wrist but, as she turned, Serena realised that her friend was far from angry; she had a look on her face that was in fact similar to one she had worn upon realising that her father planned to marry his gay lover: blind panic.

"What, B, what?"

"I said it," she replied in a rush. "But Eleanor called, and I couldn't say it then, so we went back and went to sleep and then I said it because I was scared and I almost didn't want him to hear me, and it was okay if he was asleep because _I_ would know I'd said it, and then it would be alright. But S –" Blair's eyes were wide, deep, full to the brim with fear. "When I got up this morning, he was gone, and he hadn't left a note or said a word and all I could think was _what if he heard me_, and he realised he doesn't love me back and I – you need to tell me what to do!"

"Breathe," Serena advised, gently halting Blair's flailing hands by enclosing them in her own. "And then think. You wanted to tell him how you feel for a reason, but Eleanor made you doubt yourself. Am I right?"

The dark head bowed and nodded.

"Then you have to go bigger."

"Bigger?" Blair repeated scornfully. "When I couldn't even tell him at the apartment?"

"The apartment is clandestine, secretive, and you need the real world." Serena released her friend's hands to fit her palms to her face, forcing Blair to look at her as she cupped her cheeks and smoothed the skin over her cheekbones. "If there's ever going to be any chance for you two, then it's in the real world, with other real people." She looked pensive. "The Thorpes are throwing a party tonight, and my whole family will be there. _I'll_ be there, and if he tries to bolt, because he's a guy, and the L word is like the monster under the bed for most guys, I'll deck him." One corner of her mouth curled up in a wicked smile. "Sound like a plan?"

"But what if he doesn't? He doesn't even need to say it, all I want is...hope? Hope, I suppose."

Serena leaned forward, softly bumping her forehead against Blair's. "B," she said quietly. "The guy bought an apartment for you. He lives with you. He buys you dresses, he scares the hell out of you when he's worried about you. He _has _to love you – you just need to be brave about accepting that."

"Where is the Thorpe party?" Blair inquired timorously, and Serena smiled.

"I'll text you the address."

"And I just have to be brave?"

"And you just have to be brave."

_**~#~**_

Chuck Bass didn't open doors for women or take tea at the Palace; today, it seemed, was a day for firsts. Lily watched him curiously as he ushered her ahead of him, a slight smile playing around her lips that was still a little too timid to fully form on her mouth. When he asked her what she found amusing, she laughed properly and spread the white napkin just so on her lap.

"When you act like that – like a gentleman – you remind me of your father as a young man."

"My father?" He was dumbstruck. "My father was...I was led to understand that my father –"

"Behaved in much the same manner as you supposedly do?" Lily arched an elegant brow and tilted the silver teapot with an expert grace. "Oh, he did. When he was building up the company, he drank and took drugs and slept with more models than I have pairs of shoes. All us good little girls were scandalised, whispering about him in the courtyard at school while he was in his twenties and wreaking havoc. Every boy wanted to be Big Bad Bart Bass, and he caused quite a stir at Cotillion." She tilted her head on one side, and her profile was perfect even in the dim light of New York rainfall. "Evelyn had just returned from school in Switzerland, and he couldn't take his eyes off her. She refused to dance with him, of course – her reputation would have been destroyed – and continually refused to see him thereafter. I think she must have known what she was doing, because he immediately set to making himself into the kind of man she could be proud of: chivalrous, proper, always appropriate."

Chuck sat in awe as she poured, bombarded by this sudden tide of information about his mother, the person he had never known and his father, the creature he had only ever known dimly and whom he had feared and loved in equal measure.

"It's why it hit him so hard when she died," Lily continued. "I'm sorry it hurt you so much too, Charles."

"She was my mother, I ought to have expected it."

"No, you shouldn't have." Her eyes were a pleasant light brown, though they did not shade hazel as his did. "If things between Bart and I had ever worked out, I would have considered it my honour to try a fill that part of your life, even a little."

"I know he loved you," Chuck said baldly.

"Not enough, it seems." She stirred her tea. "Then you would have had siblings, a different plan for your life...but enough about the past. We're here to talk about the future – more importantly, your future."

"My future?"

"As head of the company."

"Go on."

Lily took a small sip from the delicate china cup, her lips only just touching the rim before she set it back down. "As much as I trust that you can deliver on your image and the reinforcement that gives the brand, I don't want you to be constrained forever by who and what Chuck Bass is and always be worrying about what you should or shouldn't say, do, wear." Her gaze flickered fondly over his purple tie. "The Thorpes are hosting a party tonight to celebrate their official move to the city. All the big names in business will be there, all the well-known faces, everyone I think you should meet. Now, I don't want to impose –"

"You're not imposing." He tried to smirk but failed, settled for swallowing a mouthful of tea instead. At the risk of being seduced by her idea, it was a good one: bad boy Bass couldn't last forever, and he needed to cement himself in the world of business as an adult if he were ever to succeed there. At the same time...had he heard it, or was it just wishful thinking, hovering on the edge of his consciousness as sleep beckoned? Her voice was just that little bit hoarse, too sweet and secret in the darkness: _I love you_. Had he dreamed that?

And what if he hadn't?

But for the first time in a long, long time, Chuck wasn't afraid. The night before had been a mere setback in a greater purpose, a greater minefield to navigate. Whether she had said those three significant words, eight important letters didn't matter, because they were what she deserved from him. She deserved to know her worth in the most incontrovertible way possible, to partake of the words he had never even offered to anyone else, because she made him understand. She was November, his and hers and theirs alone, and she had made him understand love.

Impossible.

Improbable now, he supposed, with a half smile lingering on his lips.

"I'll be there tonight," Chuck said slowly, pausing as his phone vibrated against his leg. "Excuse me."

_The Thorpe Enterprises Housewarming Party  
Copper Rooms  
Tonight  
8 PM  
Don't be late_

He closed his fingers around it and smiled.

_**~#~**_

It was Serena who carefully linked the eye hooks on her lingerie, Serena who outlined her lips and painted them full crimson, Serena who helped her into the revelation of a dress which Blair had chosen for the occasion.

"Oh, B," she breathed, and there really wasn't much more to say.

It was scarlet and fell directly from her breasts to the floor, accenting its point of origin with a deep V of cleavage but no other detail. There were no sleeves, only slender bands of fabric which tumbled down Blair's arms and draped gracefully behind her back. She looked outrageous, utterly inappropriate, intoxicating. Her own red mouth looked strange in the mirror, highlighting her relative pallor and feverish eyes. She turned her head from side to side, and there was something dangerous about her reflection.

"Who is she?" Blair asked curiously.

"She's you," Serena replied. "On a mission."

"I'll see you there?"

"Of course."

Cinderella was off to her ball.

He met her on the sidewalk, ignored the shameless looks raking her from every male in attendance, raised her hand to his lips in a gesture which robbed her of speech. Her mouth was dry, and the words were once again just lying on her tongue, waiting to fall and see what ripples they would cause. Blair was infinitely glad that Serena had twisted her hair back into a chignon and denied her a place to hide. Instead, she focused on their hands, on the heat tingling from his palm into hers.

"I have something to tell you," he said.

She swallowed. "Me too."

Chuck led her past the main door to the party, and she followed him blindly. She was convinced by this point that she would follow him anywhere, so disarmed was she by her own apprehension. They used the service elevator to rise as high as it would go, and then Blair picked up the skirts of her wondrous dress and followed him up the fire escape onto the roof.

The city sky was half black, the other half dyed purple, shaded indigo and plum. They moved in unison towards the railing, looking out at the city with tension radiating unchecked from both of them. She could feel him watching her, but she was elsewhere; a little way away, the summit of a building was aflame. The fire was slowly but surely being doused, but Blair could empathise. Her hand was inches away from his on the railing, and every breath seemed to bring it closer. The building wouldn't crumble, but there was every chance that she might – that fact terrified her more than words could or couldn't say, more than even the possibility that her feelings might be unrequited. He'd promised her his _feelings_, not his love, and the connotations of those distinct words were twisting her insides. The sheer amount of skin on display ought to have chilled her, but she was that building: consumed, irrationally, at risk of losing her mind over flames which had begun in her head and ended the rush for certainty in her heart.

His skin brushed against hers, and the current crossed wires and metal and earthed itself in her flesh.

He turned as she did, and the glow of the dying fire stained his face with saturnine strangeness on one side. His black-gold eyes held all that light, the entire night sky, all the pieces: the sum total, in short, of everything. She blinked against the vision, and his fingers curled irresistibly over hers.

His lips parted.

"There you are!"

Blair deflated and cursed every god and goddess in the pantheon as the inner stair door creaked open, revealing a young woman with glossy, mahogany coloured skin and a skin-tight silver dress. She was holding a glass of champagne in one hand, and her long black hair didn't even stir in the night breeze. Chuck stiffened, and his grasp became still and without comfort.

"Raina."

"Chuck." Raina Thorpe glided to his side and kissed his cheek, turning her back on Blair and completely ignoring her presence. "I've been thinking about you."

"Have you?"

"Yes." Her fingertips smoothed his lapel, pulled it into true. "I know our last encounter was a little – shall we say dramatic? – but I was hoping we could put that behind us." She leaned in closer and, although every word was whispered, to Blair they sounded louder than thunder. "I remember it so well, and together – well – just think what we could achieve. You wouldn't have to be a little fish in such a big pond anymore. We could –"

But Blair had had enough. Pressing her cerise lips angrily together, she ground out, "Excuse me?"

Raina turned, the fragile line of her collar bone gleaming. "My...I'd know who you were anywhere, you look so much like your mother." Her eyes narrowed. "I didn't realise you two knew each other; though I suppose, as you're up here all alone, you haven't been properly introduced."

His eyes found hers, hot and black and full of furious desperation. She felt as though the world should stop spinning, as if the earth should shake – and yet all that happened was that cruelly painted mouth kept on moving, lips parting and then slamming together again like the doors of a prison.

"Blair Waldorf," said Raina Thorpe, who knew not what she did, what she had broken. Chuck felt his entire body judder as if something mortal were being ripped away from him or forced into his veins. "Allow me to introduce Charles Bass, CEO of Bass Industries. Chuck, this is Blair Waldorf, daughter of Eleanor of Eleanor Waldorf Designs."

Blair.

Blair Waldorf, Eleanor Waldorf's daughter.

Nate's Blair Waldorf, the almost Vanderbilt girl.

The almost Vanderbilt girl who was redder than flames, who snatched her hand from his as if he'd never taken her to bed in a rainstorm, who ran for the staircase with no words cast back over her shoulder, no final glance at her shocked, lovely face. But Raina wasn't finished, was still letting words pass her lips as if they meant anything at all. Her hand suddenly gripped his face, and he was looking at her against his will, fighting to avoid the wrong shade of brown in her eyes.

"I can make you great," she promised. "And she...she's a nobody. A nothing. Last I heard, her own parents don't even want her. Why should you? Why should the head of Bass Industries –" Her lips moved over his cheek once more, eliciting no response from the skin beneath. "Settle for anything but the best in a partner?"

So it had come to this, as he'd known it always would: his father's legacy, or his own.

The rooftop, or the stairs.

Money, or love.

November...or Blair.

* * *

**_*ducks pitchforks* Hey, you knew this was coming!  
I have three special mentions this chapter: big gratitude and hugs first to Kate (_MegamiTenchi_) for talking me down from the C/B ledge in my mind and cross-questioning this chapter into shape, and second to Steph (_comewhatmay.x_), my style guru, who sourced Blair's all too real and all too mind-blowing red Alexis Mabille dress and made her into a woman on a mission. Finally, a big shout out and cheek kisses to all my ladies on _Fan Forum_ and _Gossip Girlsss,_ not forgetting _Gossip-Fic_ - what would I do without you?__  
Thanks to:_ d, xoxogg4lifexoxo, Laura, ellibells, Rosss, QueenBee10, Stella296, thegoodgossipgirl, wrighthangal, notoutforawalk, mlharper, lesliexhale, Poinsettia, SaturnineSunshine, GoodGirl793, blair4eva, fswickar, anabella-chair _and_ CBfanhere._ Your hatred for Eleanor warms my heart, and your comments are truly inspirational._**


	15. Hearts & Clubs

**14. Hearts & Clubs**

"_There she is._"

_Chuck leaned forward, but all he could see was a flicker of red and white summer dress disappearing into the wide white house. Dissatisfied but too lazy to care, he leaned back in his chair and regarded the expanse of ocean stretching before them, densely populated as it was with bikini clad females. _"_Honestly, Nathaniel, I don't care. Date who you want, just don't expect me to make friends with her._"

"_You'll like her," Nate insisted. _"_She's smart._"

"_Unless she's also hot, blonde and good at multi-tasking, I'm not interested._"

"_Can't you be happy for me?_"

"_I am happy for you,_"_ Chuck replied pragmatically. _"_But even the idea of monogamy frankly disgusts me. I'm going back to the city tomorrow,_"_ he continued. _"_Give your Claire my best._"

"_Her name is Blair._"

"_Blair?_"

"_Blair Waldorf._"

Frustratingly, that was all he remembered of her: that flutter of fabric, perhaps an inch or two of slender leg. Chuck knew she wouldn't return to the apartment, but that was nevertheless where he went; he sat on the bed and held the paleness of her discarded slip between his hands. His reflection in the mirror looked as it ever had, but it had been a long time since he'd expected the image to crack. Automatically, he straightened his bow tie, then flicked it askew once again as the movement irritated him.

"If I'd found you," he murmured. "On Cooper's Beach. If I'd found you then."

He knew the way things would have gone, aged fifteen or so and led around by his libido. The fascination would have been the same, and he'd have coveted her despite Nate's claim. She would have been repulsed by his character, his attentions, the focus of his gaze on her even across a crowded room. Was she enough of an adventurer to cross that space, to take the glass from his hand and ask why he wouldn't stop looking?

Chuck didn't know.

It had taken so long for him to even acknowledge that he had feelings at all that he was unsurprised by his stunning naivete: he had believed that a relationship, real and tangible, would have worked between them even with all the layers of anonymity and separation which divided her east from his west and left his star wandering alone. No one had ever expected him to grow up and face up to reality – even she hadn't asked it of him – so he hadn't. He'd accepted what he could get with bad grace, with the risk of everything for her compared to the cost of nothing for him.

Nothing but her heart.

He pressed his face into the fabric and inhaled:

_November_.

Blair.

Then her cruel mother was Eleanor, and her careless father was Harold. The leggy blonde he sometimes just caught in pictures of her was Lily's daughter, clearly, if he remembered Nate's occasional commentary well enough. Serena van der Woodsen was the beautiful Serena she so envied, the Serena he was never allowed to meet in case she stole him away. They had spent months thinking that every association and acquaintance was many times removed, and yet Chuck had been inches away from her for most of his life. Her story was his, and it was a tale that stretched back far beyond darkened clubs and red dresses and surveillance tapes. To deny one's past was to deny oneself, so they claimed; he couldn't live in denial any longer. No longer could he claim that there were two worlds, two timelines, two calendars – to live in one world, and to have her love in one world would not enslave him, but set him free.

He carried the slip with him to the limo, and held it in his hands as they drove. He didn't know why he did it, but it seemed important.

"_It was stupid of me to think Blair had changed._"

The last words spoken to him on the subject of Blair Waldorf.

"No," Chuck said aloud, ignoring Arthur's inquiring gaze in the rear view mirror. "It was stupid of you to want her to be anything other than what she is."

And he was a fool if he wanted anything more.

_**~#~**_

There were headlines with his name in them.

So many headlines.

There were pictures of his restless hands, his face.

So many pictures.

Blair's heart beat dully as she clicked each link, slow and deliberate and almost still as the truth scrolled out before her, denying her any but the most superficial of answers. He played games – with money, with women, with drugs – but she needed to know if he had played her. She needed to believe that she was not just another girl, not just another conquest, not just another commodity to be bought and sold though in the end, that hardly mattered. Chuck Bass and Blair Waldorf were as far from each other as they could possibly be, and he had never cared for her because he had never known her. Such feelings as he had were for the enigmatic, impoverished November – Blair Waldorf, poor little rich girl did not even come close to the person he had made her out to be. They were distinct, different, separate.

He was in lust with a lie.

She had fallen horribly and hard for reality.

Because Chuck Bass as broken as Charlie was, as violent in his opinions and desires and the desire to have and hold. Chuck Bass had let her into half his life, half his name, but he had never looked for more. He had never looked past the girl in the red dress to her, she, because that girl with her scarlet lips was ten times what Blair could ever be. She wasn't afraid of her own body, her own blood, her own passion.

November wasn't afraid of anything.

"I really screwed it up this time," she murmured to Serena as she arrived bearing tea and sympathy. "Didn't I?"

"What did you screw up?" Serena curled her body carefully into the bed beside Blair. "You weren't the one who was supposed to come after you. You weren't the one who professed to have all these feelings and then didn't come through." She handed over her vague attempt at ginger tea, and Blair was comforted by the scent if not the taste, comforted by Serena's fingers combing softly through her hair.

"But I don't blame him," she returned. "I can't blame him for it. Blair Waldorf is not a person who Chuck Bass could – I mean, we're not meant for each other. He's meant for someone beautiful, someone ambitious who can match him in everyone he does, someone who can understand him. He needs someone who won't shy away, even when he does and says the worst things imaginable." Her fingertip was still making an impression on the liquid crystals of the screen, and she couldn't seem to move it away. "She needs to be as dark as he can be, to be good when he needs it."

Serena breathed a kiss onto the crown of Blair's head, gently removed the laptop from her grasp. "'She' sounds a hell of a lot like you."

"Will my heart break?" Blair whispered, closing her dry eyes. "If we don't end this together?"

"That depends."

"On what?"

"On how much of your heart you've given him to break."

"I gave him the whole thing." Even the warm familiarity of her friend's body behind her couldn't draw the bitterness from Blair's voice. "I gave him the whole damn thing, Serena, and he gave me diamonds. I never told him he had it, even when I should have."

"He never asked you for it."

"I never asked him for diamonds."

It seemed a miraculous conclusion to come to in the midst of all this ruin, something so shallow.

"B –"

"He never asked for my heart," she repeated, still spilling out the words so they wouldn't choke her. "But I never asked him for diamonds."

_**~#~**_

Lily was wearing gold, and it struck him how much she resembled what he had seen of her daughter. She welcomed him into her home, past the tasteful modern art and professionally chosen glasses standing in neat rows, into the hub of the wheel of the van der Woodsens. The couch before the fire was already occupied by a boy, a young man hovering in that awkward place between maturity and innocence, but he smiled and closed his book and disappeared upstairs without another word.

"Your son?"

"Eric." She smiled proudly. "He's reading Sartre for the debate team's visit to Cologne."

"Existence precedes essence."

"Yes."

They sat down, and he folded his hands and imagined the feel of silk running through them. Lily was expectant, waiting, very nearly asking as she watched him hesitate and hedge and work his way to a question as if Chuck were the one readying himself for debate. Finally, he said, "You were in the same class as my mother, you made your debuts together. You were at Constance Billiard together."

"We were."

"Were you..." He swallowed. "Did you know Eleanor Waldorf?"

"Yes." She regarded him with her light, unflinching gaze. "I knew Eleanor – though I suspect you don't and wouldn't care to, so you must be here to talk to me about Blair. She must be the one you've been seeing."

"Blair." Chuck repeated the name, though it still made no sense to him.

"She's not who I would have expected of you," Lily continued. "She's beautiful, of course, but intelligent, proud to a fault; almost always stubborn to the point of pigheadedness." She laughed. "She's a romantic, but I can't imagine her falling victim to your prodigious charms, Charles. What in the world did you do to capture her attention?"

"I need to know," he replied, exchanging her question for one of his own. "What would my father have done if he had hurt someone like that? You told me he changed for my mother, so is that what I do? What do I need to change?" The look in his black-gold eyes verged on fervour. "Whatever I have to do to get her back, Lily, I'll do it, but you have to tell me what my father would have done. I have to know what's right. I have to know how he would have made things good again."

"Oh, Charles." And to the apparent surprise of both, she leaned forward and brushed her cool lips against his cheek. As she drew away, Chuck was surprised to find a blush heating his skin. After a moment's pause, Lily's tone sobered. "You reminded me of Sartre's philosophy that existence precedes essence – but I don't know if you truly understand what that means. It means that where you come from, who your parents are, how many blows you've taken doesn't matter; we define who we are by what we do, and that doesn't mean you have to become your father." She smiled gently. "Blair's greatest fear is becoming her mother, and it's hard because she is the very image of Eleanor at that age. But you look like _your_ mother, not your father and, as much as I cared for Bart, he wasn't the model of how to be a man."

"So what do I do?" Chuck asked desperately. "What do I do if I can't do what he did?"

"What do you want to do?" Lily responded easily. "It would be obvious to anyone that you care for her, and that should be what guides you, not what your father would have done. What does Blair need? What do you want? Do that –" And she reached out to brush a wayward strand of hair away from his brow, to straighten his bow tie. "And you'll become a man in a way your father never was."

He left with her blessing to fight, and the wickedly immature sense that he was doing something his father would have disapproved of. Bart had raised him in the dark, without love, without the clear lines of good and evil to walk as he chose. Blair had, in her way, replaced the venerated image of his father he held in his heart, and the closest thing he had to a mother had told him to think about what she needed, what he wanted. He didn't want but need, as he always had with her, needed to see her, even just to breathe the same air as she did. Chuck didn't know what she needed because he refused to be ten steps ahead, refused to focus on anything but the movement of her slip between his hands on one more journey.

The face attached to the body blocking the elevator doors was all too recognisable.

"Hello, Serena."

"Don't you think you've done enough damage?" She was formidable, certainly, in the black dress she had worn to the Thorpe party. "I still owe you for knocking her down, Chuck, so I suggest you leave now."

"I need to speak to her."

"Why?"

"Is that any of your business?"

The blue eyes flamed. "Blair is my best friend."

"Really?" Chuck's tone was insolent. "Because it seems to me that I've been the one caring for her these past few months, not you."

"She wouldn't let me help her!"

"Did you even try?"

"How dare you!"

"Serena."

It wasn't enough to flood him with hope, that calm little voice, too tranquil to convey anything but its purpose as a mask for the feelings beneath, but at least it was something. He followed the line of magnetism to her feet, bare on the staircase they had stumbled and shuddered their way up, once upon a time; her lips were bare of colour. She wouldn't look at him as she descended, the sleeves of her blue velvet robe brushing the rail with her eyes cast studiously downwards.

"Blair, he –"

"He's not going to eat me," Blair said quietly. "And he's right, we need to talk."

"I still think –"

"It's okay, S." She had reached the bottom step.

Serena left, marching up the stairs with a look which indicated both anxiety and disapproval. There was the sound of a door slamming, and then they were alone: alone in the room, in the city, in the world but for each other. She looked different from the girl of a few hours past, and he felt different, so perhaps they were a matched pair. Slowly, she raised her eyes, and when their dark lustre fell on him Chuck felt sick to his stomach, sick in his chest where there was no acid to churn, burn, tie his tongue.

"You should have told me," he said.

"You should have asked."

"Did you know?"

Blair shook her head.

"Are you sure?"

She scowled, and the expression was not pretty. "Of course I'm sure, Chuck, I'm pretty much certain that, had I known who you were and what you're famous for and who your father was and how close I was to getting in too deep with you, I would have called it off the moment we met and not waited until we'd both been through enough to change the game entirely. It doesn't matter, anyway."

"Why?" He started forward and she stood her ground, letting the space between them close without so much as a raised brow. "Why would you say that?"

"I'm not her."

"Who?"

"November!" He felt a hot flash of anger as she turned her back on him, gripped her arm and brought her spinning back round. "I'm not November," she insisted, and now the closeness was too much and made her eyes seem too pure and too black. "I am too disgusted by every part of myself to even _look_ at another person, let alone to –" Blair broke off, shook her head. "I don't have sex in alleyways, or on floors, or to say that it's okay because I'm here and I won't fly away. I'm so ashamed of the fact that I didn't get into Yale that I avoid my father, and I can't call my mother because I'm afraid of what she might say. I am _poor_ –" Her voice cracked just a little, though her eyes were hot and dry. "And I am poor through my own fault, and I steal from trash who still have more money than I do, more to survive on and throw away. I am not _anything_ to you, no one, nobody. You don't know me."

"I know you."

"No, you don't."

"I know you." He pulled her hand into his and held it hard, tried to impress something upon her by the contact. It was natural to want to hold her, to feel her skin, more natural than a silk slip held in lieu of her touch. "And you're scared because I didn't come after you tonight, and you thought that meant I didn't care. I gave you an out and you took it, because you're almost more afraid than I am of being happy and of being something to someone."

"With Raina, you –"

"I don't care about Raina! I did the most dangerous thing possible when I let you in, when I let you see who I am and how gutless I can be, and it was worth it. If I got through my fear for you, you can get through yours for me." He knew that Blair Waldorf wanted to be Audrey Hepburn, to live her life that way. He knew how to give it to her. "You have until tomorrow to decide."

"What?"

He ran his fingertip along the curve of her chin, willed her to look back at him. "We're never going to be safe. We're never going to be easy. We're never going to be anonymous, deniable, disposable – so are you brave enough, or aren't you? I'll be waiting at the top of the Empire State Building."

"You can't _Affair to Remember_ me."

"You don't control me, Waldorf."

She did look back at him then, expression empty but for a kind of quiet consideration. "Do you love me?"

"Yes."

Blair breathed out, and it blazed across Chuck's fingers.

* * *

_**No more Charlie. No more November. One last fight to the finish. If you've stuck with them this far, then my hat is off to you. Thanks to:**_** 88mary88, mal, CBfanhere, Stella296, Poinsettia, Rosss, flipped, QueenBee10, xoxogg4lifexoxo, L, GoodGirl793, Lalai, Kensley-Jackson, MegamiTenchi, ellibells, FatalDestruction, thegoodgossipgirl, ggloverxx19, maryl, mlharper, Nikki999, fswickar, Tiffany, notoutforawalk, CBLove21, blair4eva, louboutinlove****, SaturnineSunshine****, Skatious _and_ TruC7_, plus some majorly intense loving this week to all the people making noise for VF on Tumblr.  
If you fancy a rant or have any questions to ask before this affair is to be or not be remembered, links to my Tumblr and Formspring are on my profile._**_**  
**_


	16. The Projectionist

**15. The Projectionist  
**

It had been years since she'd dialled that number of her own volition, and now her fingers shook. The automatic, previously desirable nausea was rising, filling her throat, choking her. The cigarette burn at the base of her spine tingled. This wasn't the way it was supposed to be, surely, between two people who were supposed to love each other –

Between a mother and a daughter.

"Blair, darling! How lovely to hear from you!"

"Don't talk."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I said don't talk, Mother."

She would not let him be right.

She would not be afraid anymore.

"It's my turn to do the talking. It's my turn to tell you about my life, and how it should be, and how it isn't because of you." Her knuckles were white around the familiar oblong of her cell phone. "I know what you want for me, and I know why you want it. You want another model for your line, another Eleanor Waldorf original, and I've never fought against that. I have _tried_, Mother – I've tried." Blair laughed, and it was a brittle sound. "But here's the truth: I'm not you. I never will be you, and I never want to be you. You can't take back the mistakes of your life through mine. You are cold and hard, and you left me to fend for myself when I was eighteen and I'd just broken up with Nate and I was so, so scared. I knew what you wanted me to be, and I let Maureen Vanderbilt put her filthy hands all over me for you. I let her _brand_ me for you."

"I have never encouraged you to –"

"I'm not done!" It came out like a shriek, half-desperate, half-empty. "I have said and done things I'm not proud of, but at least they're my mistakes to regret. I will not regret not speaking to you again, because I have something that you will never have, Mother."

"Yes?" Eleanor's tone was acerbic, and Blair could just imagine her: diamond rings on her long fingers, coiffed brown hair and scathing expression. "And what is that?"

"I'm loved," Blair said softly. "I'm loved like you will never be loved, because you will never let someone get close enough to you to be loved like that. He fights for me. He wins against you."

"You're a child. You're a child, and you're still living in a fairytale."

"And you're dreaming if you think you still have a daughter."

_**~#~**_

'_Chuck? Raina. I was very upset when you disappeared like that – so upset, in fact, that I had your people organise us a lunch. Be there at noon, or I might have to direct my attention elsewhere._'

"I've never done this before."

Chuck Bass was surrounded by flowers.

Nate clapped a hand on his shoulder. "Never thought I'd see the day."

"Thank you, Nathaniel. That inspires so much confidence."

"Dude, they're flowers."

Chuck rolled his eyes to Heaven. "Everything has to be perfect, or the entire thing may as well have been for nothing. I am _trying_ –" And the acute look of stress and sleeplessness on his face was in absolute agreement. "To construct a fairytale in order to convince a very scared woman that yes, we are meant to be together and no, she shouldn't decide to hate me for waiting until the last possible second to find out who she was." He sighed. "And I have no doubt that Serena is at this very moment making one hundred percent sure that Blair realises I only expressed my feelings for her when I literally had no other options."

"Serena?" Nate's eyes ran red hot. "You met Serena?"

Chuck's were too dark. "At least I no longer have to ask why the two of you broke up."

"Nothing ever happened between me and Serena!"

"But you wanted it to."

"So what if I did?"

"I don't know." Chuck ran his finger down the stem of a tulip and dismissed it as too pedestrian. "If this experience has taught me anything, it's that women have a tendency to know when your heart's not in it."

Nate chuckled. "Cheer up, man – after all, your heart's so in it you're standing in a florist like a wimpy kid at a ball game. I think she likes those ones; the big pink ones with the floppy petals." He removed a peony from its bucket of water, handed it to Chuck. "All you have to do is buy a bunch, get in an elevator and get the girl. Nothing could be simpler."

Red dress.

Bathroom.

Sake singing on her tongue.

Burn.

Stage.

Broken glasses.

Violence.

Redemption.

A different kind of violence.

"Get the girl," he repeated dully. "Nothing could be simpler."

'_Bass, I strongly suggest you go to lunch with Raina Thorpe today. Are you really willing to risk Thorpe investment just because you don't particularly care for the girl? That doesn't sound like Bart Bass' son to me_.'

_**~#~**_

"I need to get off this island."

"Oh?" Serena arched a brow, flipped a page in her magazine. She had clearly decided that it was her solemn duty to watch Blair slowly tearing herself to pieces through indecisiveness, picking up first this dress and then another, running her hands over the box containing her Erickson Beamon necklace over and over, biting her lip and eyeing the box of macarons situated temptingly by Serena's right hand. She looked pale, hardly pulled together.

"I can't see it. I can't stop seeing it...it's everywhere I go, S!"

"You made up your mind not to go." She turned another page. "He only loves you because he has no other options, etcetera, we've been through this. You're going to have to get used to the fact that the Empire State Building is a major landmark in Midtown Manhattan, and it meant something to you once."

"Why are you being like this?"

"B." Serena sat up, and her voice was a little gentler. "You called your mother this morning, and you told her how you felt. You didn't feel ready, you told me, to go through all that with another person. If Chuck and you are meant to be together, you'll eventually find your way back. You shouldn't have to go all the way up to the eighty-sixth floor of some 'stupid Art Deco landmark' to prove yourself to anyone. You didn't sever ties with your mother for him. You don't owe him anything." She offered a half-smile. "Why don't we go to the Met, or to MoMA? There's that gelato cart on the corner near Constance still, I checked."

"I..." Blair caught sight of her reflection in the mirror, and it scared her. "I have to change."

"What's wrong with what you're wearing?"

Because of course what she was wearing wasn't important, not if they were only going to visit old hunting grounds and share old secrets. Of course the purple patterned dress which pulled in at her small waist would be just right, and of course she shouldn't need to dig through her closet – the one which contained _her_ clothes, not ones which had been bought for her – for something better, something more...important.

"Serena?"

"Yes?"

"Don't let me anywhere near that building."

_**~#~**_

How could so little of the day have passed since he last checked the time, last skulked around the apartment with the music of some trashy band blaring not quite loudly enough to drown out his thoughts? Chuck was sorely tempted by the scotch decanter in the newly repaired drinks cabinet, but for once he abstained. Without company of the kind he so craved, that way lay only darkness.

"So this is your new place. I like it."

He bolted upright and off the bed, appalled beyond belief to see Raina Thorpe leaning against the doorframe Blair must have passed through dozens of times, stripping it of sacred memories. This was a place where he was allowed to feel naked, but now he had an urgent desire draw his jacket off the chair and put as many layers between himself and her as possible. He tried to cough, smile, cover the awkward moment. "Raina. What are you doing here?"

"I guessed you might skip lunch."

"It's barely eleven."

"But you left so quickly the other night." She pouted, and he loathed it. "I still need to talk to you, Chuck, whether you want to or not."

"I prefer to talk after."

But those were the wrong words, destined for the wrong girl; she'd struck gold.

"My, my." And now her perfume was heavy in the air, still the wrong scent. Raina glided forwards, her heels seeming to make no impression on the thick carpet. She laid her hands on his shoulders and blinked imploringly up at him. "Chuck," she breathed. "You know how much I need...to talk." Her fingers slipped downwards, toying with his breast pocket. He looked at her, at the cool beauty of that mahogany skin. Here was a fruit he had tasted once before, and it had clung to him and wanted more.

Now he was prepared to give more, but not to her.

"Raina," he said quietly. "Raina."

"Yes?"

"You called Blair Waldorf a nobody."

"She is."

"A nothing."

"So?"

He would almost have been willing to forgive her – not to fall between her too willing legs, but to forgive her – if she'd taken it back or tried to justify herself or lied and told him lies about what a sweet girl she thought she understood more about than he did. But she had broken something he needed to fix, and she needed to know that her deed would not go unpunished.

"Raina," he whispered, and then leaned close to her ear so as to impart the full force of reasoning behind his unbeatable argument.

"Yes?" She was quivering, on the edge of something; Chuck laughed.

"I'm in love with Blair Waldorf," he told her, and relished the stiffening of each of her vertebrae in swift succession. "I want her, and I don't want you. You are nobody and we were nothing, one night that was supposed to be one night only until you sank your claws in and thought you'd conquered the great Chuck Bass. Her parents may not want her, but I do. She gets to _know_ that she conquered me. She gets to be here, in this apartment, with me. She gets to choose me." And his hand was cruel, brushing so tenderly and condescendingly against her cheek. "You don't have that option."

On the dresser, a bouquet of peonies rested peacefully – for now – in a deep green vase, darker than their stems.

That said it all, really.

_**~#~**_

"It must be irritating for the Met, don't you think? To have this Vermeer and not _Girl with a Pearl Earring_?"

The picture before them was glorious enough, its hues of blue and red bright and vivid and fresh; still, she continued. "It would make me so mad to know that his most famous work was in London rather than here, with so many others. They should collect them all, keep them all in one place."

"I don't think that's how it works."

"Do you prefer the Van Gogh?"

Blair had already visited the great artist's self-portrait, her hand casually wrapped around a copy of the catalogue as if she actually needed it for reference. "At least he's honest." She stared at the young woman's painted hand on the shutter. "Why would she be opening the window with a water pitcher in her hand? Is she trying to give someone a shower?"

Serena giggled. "Oh, B."

"S," she replied, and then more seriously. "S."

"Blair?" Serena had stopped laughing. She took her friend's hand between both of hers, feeling only the texture of Blair's grey glove and not living skin. "Look, I know it's hard. I know it's hard to be here, to be here and not think about it, to be in the city at all, but I really think that you –"

"I'm going."

"What?"

"I'm going." Blair shook back her hair over her shoulders, and to Serena's surprise there was a light behind her face like someone had lit a candle there. She smiled, and both were shocked by how genuine it was. "I'm going," she repeated. "I can't not go. I can't hold on forever telling myself that I would have grown up on my own anyway, that Chuck didn't change me because he did, Serena, and it was for the better. He saw something in me that no one – not Nate, not you, not my mother – has ever seen. He sees that in me. He's waiting for me."

"But what you said last night, about finding your way back –"

"I love him," Blair said simply. "Which might be the stupidest thing I've ever done, but it makes me feel strong. It makes me feel brave. I don't want to have to wait who knows how long to feel like this again so I can climb that stupid Art Deco landmark and tell him we didn't go through all the lies and the hurt for nothing."

"Are you sure?" Serena looked her straight in the eyes, blazing blue into burning brown. "Blair, are you sure?"

"I'm sure about him." She looked back at the painting, and her smile only became more pronounced. "I think I always was."

And then Serena laughed aloud and kissed Blair's forehead, and smiled with her with their faces so close together that the heat from their flushed cheeks radiated back and forth. "Go!" She urged. "It's already half past twelve, you're already late! Go, B, go!"

The gallery rang with Blair's lemon yellow heels as she ran for the door, for the exit, for the outside world where the air was free and there were cabs which could cleave through traffic like hot butter and magically, mystically take her where she wanted to be thirty minutes back in time so she could be there first, so she could be waiting, so she could be standing on the observation desk with every gawping tourist, every bored teenager and every romantic in New York and know that she was anything but a cliché because her reasons for being there mattered more than anything else in the world.

Midtown traffic at that time of the day was not kind.

It took her ten minutes.

Another five racing into the building, into a crowded elevator, up to the eighty-sixth floor.

But then she was there, her heart so hard up against her ribs that she thought it might tear free and dart ahead of her, keep pace with the flicker of her eyes from one face to the next and the next because none of them were the right face, the face she needed to see, the face that promised her everything. Her phone told her that it was twelve forty-five, three quarters of an hour after the deadline that had been set because it was meant to be their _Affair to Remember_, Nickie and Terry and Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, only no one would be late this time, no one would smash the picture perfect window and spoil the painting.

But she had.

She hadn't meant to, but she had.

A nearby guard caught the expression on her face. "Is there something I can help you with, Miss?"

"I'm meeting a young man here – probably in a bowtie."

He made an attempt at joviality. "Any advance on a bowtie?"

"Brown hair," she added listlessly. "Dark eyes."

"Your boyfriend?"

The city looked black from this high up, and how she wished it would swallow her whole. "No."

"This guy – is he kind of intense looking?"

"Yes."

"Overcoat over suit type?"

"So you saw him."

"I did," he said, and smiled. "Whatever it is, don't worry about it. You're far too pretty to be mad with for long."

Blair was not warmed by the flattery. "I just told him he means nothing to me, that the past months we spent together meant nothing. I just threw real, actual love back in his face, so that means no, he has every right to be mad with me, to hate me. He _should_ hate me, because I was thinking about myself and I came too late."

The guard's name was Ben, she noticed; it was inscribed on a small badge on his lapel. "I don't think he hates you."

"Why? Why would you say that?"

"Because he's been standing behind you for the last minute and a half looking like he's just won on the Mega Millions."

She almost sensed the miracle before it happened, the lightest of touches on the nape of her neck, and she turned, and then time stopped ticking – it flew, and Blair flew with it. She hit Chuck so hard that if he'd even so much as leaned back from her onslaught, they would have gone sprawling. As it was, she curled her hands into his shirtfront and held on, puckering the fabric possibly beyond repair as they rocked backwards and her lips connected with his as artlessly and sincerely as she knew how. There was silence all around them, lying thickly in their limbs, and then Chuck locked his arms behind Blair's back with enough force to crush her ribs and she opened her mouth to him, tasting salt from the tears which only made them more desperate with each other, more reckless, prompting a dance of fingers tangling in hair and slow one-two stepping in a circle, making the world spin so that their world spinning made more sense. There was newness, renewal in the familiar taste of him, of her, their once-upon-a-time acquaintance slow and fast at once with his mouth moving easily over hers, knowing her too well and knowing when it was safe to bite or kiss, to wait just long enough to make her breathless, dizzy, dying for another hit of pieces forming a whole.

He was warm like a real person when they broke, letting her tears fall as they may but not letting go, holding on and watching her face. "I didn't expect to see you today – or ever again."

"I wasn't going to show up. I was resolved not to. Every bone in my body tried to slow me. Every voice in my head screamed 'don't'."

He knew it was okay for Blair Waldorf, heroine to quote the lines spooling from the movie reel in her head, because Chuck Bass, hero – and who would ever have believed such a thing were possible – understood. He understood her need for the fable, the barely in colour movie, the swelling music and sluggish camera.

He even reciprocated, just a little.

"But?"

"But I didn't listen." Her eyes were bright, so bright but so still and full with tears and laughter that they glowed, and she glowed too. "I followed my heart because I love you. I can't deny that our path has been complicated, but in the end love makes everything simple."

He gripped her waist, neat and china doll delicate and barely his hands' span, and she gasped when he kissed her this time, tearing through the script to remind of her of whom, up to a few hours previously, they had been. That had been her fairytale; this was his. Chuck had driven in circles around the city all night, but he had climbed the ivory tower well enough when the time came. The dragon to slay had been the thought that the princess wasn't coming, and now the spell was broken. Charlie the liar was a real boy again, and November the nameless beauty was still beautiful, breathing harshly against his lips.

"I bought you flowers," he told her, extracting them with some difficulty from behind her back.

"I don't need them."

"I know."

"I gave up on my mother," she admitted. "I know she'll never change."

"I told Raina Thorpe I was in love with you."

"Are you?"

As if it were a question.

He stroked back the dark hair from her brow, felt her eyelashes like butterflies against his palm as they closed in recognition of the touch. "I'm fixed now," he murmured. "I have a heart, and I love you with all of it."

_He fights for me._

_She gets to choose me._

The Empire State Building was the closest thing to Heaven in New York City, and they knew that better than anyone.

* * *

_**Thank you all so much for how much you have invested in this story. Every question or review or alert or favourite has meant the world to me, whether it's here on **_**Fan Fiction _or on _Fan Forum_ or _Gossip Girlsss**_** or **_**Gossip-Fic_ or _Twitter_ or_ Tumblr._ Charlie and November could never have become Chuck and Blair without your support, your good humour, your kind words, your arse kicking (on occasion) _**_**and your love. Thank you all.  
As for last chapter's reviews, thank you to:**_** MegamiTenchi, TruC7, QueenBee10, LY33, ellibells, ggloverxx19, notoutforawalk, GoodGirl793, Laura, mlharper, flipped, SaturnineSunshine, Krazy4Spike, sleepdeprived91, jwoo2525, CBLove21, annablake, Stella296, Rosss, Bellemme****,**** thegoodgossipgirl, CBfanhere, fswickar, Nikki999, Poinsettia, libertine84, Kumiko212, blair4eva_ and_ jamieerine. _I hope my happy ending wasn't _too_ cheesy for you - sit tight for the epilogue, coming soon._**_**  
**_


	17. Epilogue

**Epilogue**

He hadn't bent her over anything for at least a week, and it was beginning to get to him – only exacerbated, of course, by the fact that the bitch was running one finger slowly up and down the slender column of her neck and deliberately not looking at him. That was the problem with Blair: she knew just which buttons to press, even isolated as they were on opposite sides of the table with Nate and Serena seated between like buffers between chemicals. Chuck glared at her, at the torturous way she was pouring water into her glass and at the curve of her throat as she swallowed.

"I'm not in the mood to play games." It came out as a growl.

"Neither are we," Serena said brightly, laying her fingers briefly on his sleeve and then withdrawing them as if he might scald her. "Which is why we're here."

"The Cold War must end," Nate supplied ominously, and Serena beamed at him. Chuck silently wondered whether Blair shared his nausea over the born again couple. "When you two don't talk, thing tend to go from zero to nuclear in a matter of minutes. The fact that it's been a week and we're still standing –"

"Is nothing short of a miracle." The mane of golden hair tossed, and he needed to catch her eye.

She wouldn't look at him (naturally).

"It's not my fault, S –" The glass made no sound as she sat it down on the pristine white tablecloth; when Blair did cast her eyes his way, it was to scowl. "If _someone_ doesn't get that I don't want to have an education bought for me."

"You got that scholarship on your own merit, I had nothing –"

"Of course you did, as if I could –"

"...student, you are perfectly capable of –"

"...talented than I am, they would never –"

"Explain," Nate muttered.

"She got a scholarship, and thinks he's behind it. She's refusing to touch it and is still stealing to prop up her income _and_ trying to pay him rent, which he can't understand because he bought the place outright, and _then_ she tried to give him money for some furniture they smashed during...anyway, that made him mad, which made her mad, and instead of just breaking some more furniture, she stormed out and she's been sleeping in Eric's room ever since."

"So it's not like last time?"

"Which last time?"

"The time when she texted you that she needed you and then you walked in and –"

"No." Serena gave a little shudder, and Nate reached across the table and squeezed her hand. "Nothing like that." She rapped smartly on the table like a judge with a gavel, and tried in her own personal way to call for order. "The dollar has dropped below the level of the yen! The entire country is bankrupt!"

Silence fell.

"Right," she continued. "Now the two of you have stopped snarling at each other, perhaps you'll stay quiet long enough for me to explain why we've brought you here." She gestured around at the empty restaurant, at the polished tables and elegant sidebar. "We're tired of always having to take sides and getting caught up because there's no official way of keeping us out of your business, so we've come up with this: a peace treaty based on more than just a handshake, with terms and actual rules which can't be broken. If one of you does break it, you'll be excommunicated – we'll no longer be your friends, and both of you will have to go elsewhere when you're hiding from each other. We won't have anything to do with you anymore."

The angle of his mouth was sharp, and hers was twisted. Serena poured herself some water from the pitcher and took a long, soothing drink.

_**~#~**_

"Article six: that she is obligated to attend at least one of my corporate squash games per month."

"Squash?" Blair retorted sweetly. "I'll squash you." She rifled through her own notes. "Article seven: that he is banned from the Columbia campus except in times of _dire _need and_ emergency_, not just to pop up and terrorise my project partners."

"All your project partners are male."

"And all your secretaries are female. Besides, I don't like competing with other women for the things I want."

It was enough that their eyes locked across the table, that one finger was still at her throat, that he was mad enough to want her and almost to hear the slide of her stockings as she crossed one leg over the other. Her tongue darted out, pink and petal perfect, to wet her lips – he knew that tongue, that mouth, and her eyes went dark when they followed his mind to the same place, the same plan, the same clandestine thoughts about white linen table cloths and broken china and the rasp of nylon, of silk between her legs.

Serena made a disgusted noise. "Can you hold back on the angry eye sex at least until we're done here, please?"

"Of course _I_ can – everyone knows that my self-control is unparalleled, my forte if you will – though I can't speak for him."

"While I hate to be the one to break up a good fantasy, you should know that, while Waldorf has many talents – not least of which is her Olympic standard flexibility and that thing she does with her nails which I won't mention here – when it comes to certain things, including myself, she has no self-control whatsoever." Now Chuck was the one holding himself firm, facing away from her with the tense line of his jaw broadcasting strain to the room. She was furious, certainly, with high spots of colour painting her cheekbones crimson, breathing quickly and unevenly. The rise and fall of her chest was more than of interest to him, because it was miraculous; Blair, however, could not seem to find it in herself to forgive him for the comment about her nails. He turned, and was surprised when she ducked her head, hiding her face behind a ready curtain of brown hair.

He hated it when she did that.

He hated it when she did anything to conceal her thoughts from him.

"Blair, I –"

"No." She put up a hand. "As well intentioned as this was, Serena, Nate, whether I won't stop snatching purses or he won't stop following me around – because I _know_ he does that, and he thinks I don't, and I know he only does it because he cares, but I don't care – is not the problem. The problem is that we're not wired to have a relationship, unorthodox or otherwise." He felt her words like a shock, like a heart attack, and the subdued lighting glinted on her ruby ring. "He's ready to drop bombs for me, but not to be my boyfriend."

"Blair." This time it was Serena trying.

It still made no difference.

"I'll sign the treaty," Blair said quietly, and then she was looking at him, and that look gave him a stroke on top of his heart attack and crashed a car on top of that so that Chuck was dying generally rather than specifically. "But I'm not getting back together with him. I...I need time. I need the kind of space we used to have. I need to work out whether being so unnatural and unusual is enough."

"Blair, please."

"I love you. I do." She presented him with a small, uneven smile. "And don't you dare think I don't."

"Don't go," he returned (or possibly begged). It was beyond humiliating to be reduced to such a state in front of Nate and worse, Serena, never his strongest advocate, but then again that hardly mattered. What mattered was the light going off behind her face, the light that had been there since their kiss on top of the Empire State, since his birthday when she'd stolen his proofs and sat him on the carpet and made him eat dinner with her on the rug like a child, since he'd taken her with him to Amsterdam and she'd been infinitely amused by his avoidance of its red light district. That light classified Blair as Blair, as a real person instead of a daydream; he was enough like a moth by now that he needed that light to survive, to guide him to death or exquisite ecstasy in bed beside her when she held his hand in the dead of night.

She was more than sunlight, and he needed her.

But still she was going, and he sat still at the immaculately laid table and heard her footsteps and the swing of the door, and then got up himself and was out the back door before anyone could see him, see the wreckage of his heart-attack-stroke-car-crash and pity him.

But he had a plan.

Nothing, after all, could compare to the pain of losing her the first time.

_**~#~**_

Hamilton House was never empty enough for Blair's purposes, but today she allowed herself the luxury of slouching in her armchair rather than sitting upright and pretending. Her cab ride had been dogged by thoughts of the black limo which was usually not so far away and which now, at her request, was wherever he was, knee deep in his own thoughts or neck deep in liquor. She fingered the key around her own neck, the key which granted access to these hallowed halls, walls, floors, paintings, chairs; it fell flat today, and she had only herself to blame.

The truth was no amount of tradition could explain away the fact that the place she belonged was the Park Avenue penthouse she had grown in before he even knew her name. She may as well have been playing at being November her entire life, and had only lately realised it. She was still trying to redress that balance, but he wasn't going to make it easy on her. Why, she wondered, couldn't he understand that her worth came purely from the fact that she could love him, and served no further purpose? Perhaps it was petty to visit the Guggenheim with the express purpose of parting tourists from their pathetic money belts, but at least it meant she wasn't Cinderella – but Cinderella didn't seem apt, somehow. Perhaps she felt like Christine, giving her voice to the Phantom and receiving fame and fortune in return.

Fame and fortune came, it seemed, as part of the package deal of being Chuck Bass' girlfriend.

"It's because they've never seen me with anyone like you," he'd explained. "Stumbling out of Victrola with some vapid model? Yes. Escorting a Columbia student to a formal gala? No – but then I doubt they've ever seen anyone like you before, with or without me."

He'd breathed a kiss against her forehead, and she'd felt it in every part of her.

Why couldn't he understand that she wanted to repay him for that kiss, for every kiss he'd given her when he hadn't cared if she'd snuck in off the street? No one would forgive her when she was poor, because poverty was unforgivable; Nate had gone long before then, and she had been glad when he'd studiously avoided her as his own way of showing deference and sympathy. Chuck, however, was as different from her first love as it was possible to be – she sometimes wondered how it was possible that they were friends at all. She could recall references made by one about the other when she was younger, still in the first flush of someday being a Vanderbilt. Nate had mentioned from time to time that she really should meet his best friend, that this person had read some book that she had too, that maybe she could come along to one of his poker games so they could be introduced.

Poker? Blair Waldorf?

She'd declined.

But it wasn't Blair Waldorf who'd met Chuck Bass.

Maybe the problem, therefore, came from the fact that Blair was writing a story that should have, could have been written years before. She'd been so secure in her own superiority that she never would have lowered herself to dipping even a toe in the pool of depravity attached to Chuck, Nate's omnipotent wingman in every headline, every picture until his father had died and he'd lifted the weight of the world onto his shoulders.

Until now.

_Bass Reveals New Belle_

_Spotted: Chuck Bass and Girlfriend at Gala_

_Designer's Daughter Dating Billionaire Businessman, Former Playboy_

But none of that mattered as much as the fact that she was afraid – yes, afraid – of the depth of his feelings for her. It seemed that they either raced or crawled, incapable of maintaining a steady pace or doing anything but worshipping or loathing one another until she'd slapped him and he'd hoisted her onto some convenient piece of furniture, after which they'd sink back to adoration as if there were no level of comfort between. Some days, she felt like she couldn't breathe when she was with him; others, she could only do so if he were close by.

"Blair!"

And most importantly, why did Blair always forget that Juliet Sharp was keeper of keys at Hamilton House?

"Hello." A false smile stretched Blair's mouth taut.

"Oh my God, I haven't seen you around in _forever_! Guess the new BF must be keeping you busy, right?"

One of the many things Blair disliked about Juliet was that she didn't make the most of what she had. Her caramel coloured hair and blue-grey eyes were utterly betrayed by the palette of beiges and taupes she insisted on dressing herself in, always a bandage dress, always topped with a blazer. Her hair was always pulled back too tightly from her thin face, and she always wore too much eye makeup for the daytime. Still, Blair beamed, because once Juliet's money had parted company from her person, it had bought Blair innumerable hours of electricity and many pairs of Falke stockings.

"He works a lot."

"I'll bet." Juliet took an unsolicited seat. "What is he, a billionaire? A bajillionaire?" Her eyes sparkled at her own witticism. "Are you drowning in Tiffany's yet?"

"Not yet."

"And what about Serena van der Woodsen?" Those eyes narrowed. "Is she still secretly screwing Professor Forrester?"

The million watt smile died on Blair's lips, and she twisted her mouth into what was an undeniable sneer. "Actually, no. Serena is dating Nate Vanderbilt Archibald, and they're very happy. In fact, Chuck –" Her voice caught, but only a little. "And I were at Daniel with them earlier today. They're blissful," she said distinctly. "Very much so."

"But do I sense trouble in paradise?" Juliet brushed an imaginary piece of lint from her charcoal coloured skirt. "I don't hear you describing you and Chuck Bass as blissful."

"I don't want blissful."

"No?"

"No." Blair stood abruptly, gathering up her purse and accoutrements without taking her eyes from Juliet. "Because to be blissful, you have to be like Nate and Serena: uncomplicated. I'm not 'drowning in Tiffany's' as you put it because some of us don't value what we have by carat or cut." Realisation dawned. "That's what you think, isn't it? You think I'm dating him for his money. You think that's the reason I ignore all the other stuff, the profligate playboy stuff, the person he used to be."

"Aren't you?"

"I ignore the person he used to be because that's not the person he is now. I ignore the people telling me I'm dreaming if I think he can change because I know he already has. And I ignore people like you –" She jabbed one fierce finger in Juliet's direction. "Because you don't know him, and you don't know me, and if you think we're just fooling each other then fine, go ahead."

The other girl began to speak, but Blair didn't care. She was leaving. She was going home: home to a Park Avenue penthouse where it was safe to be safe and imperfect and sometimes blissful, sometimes so dark that it was hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Back where she belonged.

It had taken her a few more weeks to discover that her doorman was named Dexter, and now they exchanged words almost every day. She found him amusing because he called her 'Miss Golightly' when she told him she didn't want to be called Miss Waldorf. Tonight she found she couldn't say a word to him, and her throat was dry as she took the elevator upwards, all the way to the very top of her personal universe.

But the apartment she entered was very different to the one she had left a week earlier.

Clothes on the couch.

Papers on the floor.

Dishes – of what, and why? – in the sink.

Blair stepped apprehensively towards the bedroom, pushing wide its door in absolute silence to discover possibly the most bizarre thing she had ever seen.

Chuck was in bed, casually dressed in a pair of his habitual silk pyjamas, and the television was on. This in itself was not surprising – Blair couldn't count the times she'd come in to find CNN on and him already asleep, and she'd had to pry the remote from his recalcitrant hand and curl up against him because he was young again when he slept, younger, a child without a care in the world but holding on to her – but today, ESPN was sounding off several rounds of statistics in quick succession, and he seemed enthralled by the rush of multiple figures back and forth across the ice.

"What are you doing?"

He didn't even turn to face her. "I'm being inadequate."

"What?"

"Inadequate." Chuck gestured at the screen. "I know how you feel, that it bothers you that we don't fight over who gets to pick the restaurant for lunch like Nate and Serena, that I don't get mad at you for leaving bags all over the floor and you don't yell at me for ignoring you when there's a Mets game on, so I've decided to be inadequate. I'll forget your birthday, I'll be late for everything. I've already taken up trashing the apartment, did you notice?"

"I did."

"Whatever it takes," he said. "Whatever it takes to make you happy, I'll do it. I want you to be happy, however that's achieved."

What could she do but be quiet for a while, not move her mouth as she watched him watching a sport she was sure would genuinely interest him if only he ever had time to stop stacking the financial decks and go and watch it. Then she walked over to the bed, pulled back the comforter – and suddenly halted, the dark blue fabric caught up in her hand with something hitting her hard, harder than any physical blow, shocking her to life with the force of electricity.

The box was small, black and velvet covered, and Blair eyed it as it sat without ceremony on the white sheet.

"Chuck Bass is a romantic," she remarked drily. "Who knew?"

"I know there should be knees involved." Chuck still seemed fixated on the game, but his voice was as apprehensive as so dark a voice could be. "And flowers, and candlelight, and all the reasons why – but after that, I'd want an answer. This way, you don't even have to open it if you don't want to, if you don't feel the time is right." The lights of the changing scenes flickered across his face. "But whether you consider this the appropriate thing to do or not, you should still know that I would do some highly stupid things for you, not limited to purchasing real estate, taking bullets, social annihilation and catching grenades."

Blair looked at him. She looked, and she saw: the hard line of his profile, his square jaw, the little boy who was too afraid of being rebuffed to even meet her gaze. "Chuck?"

"Yes?"

"I don't want you to be inadequate. I don't. I want you to be reckless and obsessive and intrusive, and I want you to scare me and drag me across floors and believe in me." She bit her lip, because they had been playing with bows and arrows and now he'd pulled a gun on her and asked her to be his. "I want all of you and I would do anything for you, whether that's right or wrong."

"And the box?"

She had already placed it on the nightstand. "I'll open it when I wake up."

Chuck did turn to her then, and his expression was an odd mixture of several emotions trying to display themselves at once. Blair shook her head as if she didn't know which one would suit either and slid into bed beside him, dropping her head onto one silk covered shoulder and inhaling the familiar scents of scotch and musk and cologne which clung to his clothing and even to his skin with something bordering on relief. "It's a strange future to want to buy into," she murmured. "The first time we met, I stole your wallet."

"It's still you that I want," he told her, mouth quirking up in half his signature smirk. "Wallet or no wallet." The screen went black, and she pressed her fingertips against the shadowed curve of his chin. "Corporate squash games or no corporate squash games." He couldn't restrain his grin then, and neither could she; her lips were curved upwards, and he could taste happiness when he kissed her.

It was about time.

They lay down together, and he drifted and put his hands in all the appropriate places (inappropriate would have to be saved for later, because he wanted an answer and she wanted to rest). He thought she was asleep and so was he, almost when he heard her speak, and the differing timbre from his own was as soothing as her breath against his skin.

"I still want to pay rent."

"Go to sleep, Blair."

"And utilities."

"No."

"And for that piano we broke."

"The New York Philharmonic has plenty of pianos."

"But I –"

"Goodnight, Waldorf."

"Same to you, Bass."

* * *

**_Ladies (and possible gentlemen), squee now or forever hold your peace.  
__Again, thank you so much for your support even for the darkest parts of this story, for sticking with me until the very end - if I ever get my hands on Ed Westwick, that boy is _so_ being cloned until he has no DNA left to be spliced and replicated, and you will each receive your very own Chuck Bass, gift wrapped.  
Thank you to:_ sleepdeprived91, blair4eva, ChairForever, Lalai, GoodGirl793, 88Mary88, annablake, QueenBee10, TruC7, Stella296, Rosss, notoutforawalk, lesliexhale, louboutinlove, MegamiTenchi, ellibells, thegoodgossipgirl, mlharper, fswickar, CBfanhere, Kensley-Jackson, flipped, Nikki999, Krazy4Spike, SaturnineSunshine, anabella-chair, Kumiko212, CBLove21, Poinsettia, dyslin, BellaB2010, Heavenlydoll, libertine84, chuckandblairlove _and_ A73104MG._ May life bring you Harry Winston diamonds, complicated bliss and the happiest of endings.  
_**


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